


NO RETURN

by InsaneTrollLogic



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Jumanji Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Deadlights (IT), Gen, Horror, Missing Persons, arcade games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:55:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22781350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsaneTrollLogic/pseuds/InsaneTrollLogic
Summary: Richie is the Loser who doesn't make it to Jade of the Orient.Turns out he's been missing since the summer of '89.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 211
Kudos: 324





	1. Chapter 1

It’s Stan who poses the question, the only one of them even vaguely clinging to the appearance of sobriety. He’s just as gone as the rest of them, though. Eddie can tell. He has his beer clenched against his shoulder, for added stability. He turns to Mike slowly, exaggerated precision in his movement. Eddie fights the urge to tap the bottom of the bottle like he would have when he was seventeen and insufferable, but then Stan says, “Why’d you ask for seven chairs?”

And Eddie’s brain goes offline for a moment as he looks around the table. It’s populated by his best friends in the whole world, who he hadn’t remembered until he walked into this room and an empty seat directly to his right, the plate clean, the water untouched.

“Richie,” Bev says.

“Fuck, _Trashmouth_ ,” Bill whispers. “How the hell did we forget about _Trashmouth?_ ”

Eddie turns urgently from the empty-handed seat next to him so he can look at Mike. “You found him, then? He’s out there and he stood us up like a colossal asshole? Because I personally would love to march straight up to casa de adult Tozier and—”

Except the smile has washed off of Mike’s face. And shit, it’s just like the last time, that sensation like he’s in free fall. The one that screams _Richie’s gone_ followed by the hard-reality of a smash against the pavement that confirms _and he’s not coming back._

“Eds,” Mike starts.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” Eddie snaps and just about everyone in the group looks like they’ve been snapped. Because it’s always been an open secret that, despite all the protests, he loved the nickname. It only went off limits for good when Richie…

“Guys,” Ben says, “Anyone else remember the sewers?”

Eddie blanches. “Oh fuck, the _clown._ ”

One of them says _Pennywise_ and like the name summoned it, everything goes to Hell.

* * *

Thing is…

Thing is they might have beat it last time. They’d had Mike’s gun. They’d had Bev back. They’d had enough anger to edge out the fear.

The clown had been slinking away from them. Cowering almost.

And then it had laughed. Hesitant but getting louder, its giddy speech carving into Eddie’s soul. “Let me go,” It had cooed. “Let me go and you have a chance. Kill me and he’s gone.”

“Richie?” Eddie had asked. He was filthy, covered in shitwater, with enough open wounds to guarantee an infection, but at that moment, none of it had registered. “Where is he!?”

“I’ve hidden him away,” Pennywise said in a rush. “Scared, but safe. And that’s where he’ll stay, safe while I take my long, long sleep.”

“It’s lying,” Stan had said.

“It killed Georgie,” Bill had sobbed.

And somehow Eddie had been pushed to the front of their little group. Eddie who was not brave, who was shaking and miserable, and so fucking scared.

“Let me go,” Pennywise coaxed, “or you’ll never see him again.”

Eddie hesitated. Then he’d lowered his bat. Bev, recognizing this for the massive fuckup that it was, had grabbed it before it hit the ground, but she hadn’t managed to swing before Pennywise slipped back down into his chasm.

Eddie let him go.

(He’d never seen Richie again.)

* * *

Stan wants to run.

To be fair Eddie wants to run, too. He definitely didn’t ask to ask for his horror-filled backstory to be dumped into his head and there’s entirely too much alcohol clouding his vision to trust his decision making right now.

But Stan wants to run. And despite the fact that Eddie’s job title is literally _risk analyst_ he trusts almost anyone in this room more than himself with making this kind of decision.

“You had to know my answer, Mike,” Stan says. “It was great seeing you guys again, but I’m not up to fight the reason I’ve been in therapy half my life. My wife’s waiting for me back home.”

And Stan loves her more than the Losers.

Eddie doesn’t blame him. It’s been twenty-seven years, most normal people would love their spouse more than their estranged childhood friends. Eddie’s married, too, and the guilt curdling in his gut tells him more than he’s comfortable knowing.

Mike tries placing placating had on Stan’s shoulder, but Stan swats it way. Hurt flashes in Mike’s eyes but he holds up his hands and says, “Richie would have wanted us to finish this.”

Stan gapes at him.

Bev says, “Mike’s right.”

Ben’s nodding solemnly. Bill has that same pinched look on his face. And Eddie…

“You know that’s bullshit, right?” Eddie only falters for a second as they all spin to look at him. “Richie would tell us to run.”

“He wha-wha-was--”

Eddie feels a little bad cutting Bill off, but the alcohol has loosened his tongue, made him bold in a way he doesn’t quite remember. “He was _terrified._ You saw him in that house, Bill. He found a missing poster with his face on it and he was terrified that it was going to happen to him.”

“And then it _did_ ,” Stan snaps. “You really think he’d want the same thing to happen to us, _any_ of us? Because I don’t know about you, but I can’t do that again. He’d want us safe. You guys know that’s true.”

“So what?” Ben asks. “We just let it happen again? Like it happened to us.”

Bill looks away.

“Richie would tell us to _run,_ ” Stan says, looking Eddie’s way for support.

If Richie was here, if _all of them were here_ , Richie would want to run. And Eddie would follow him instantly. But Richie’s not here. And the thing Richie was scared of—the thing he’d _always_ been scared of—was the idea that he’d die alone. Forgotten and unloved.

If they leave now, they might forget again and that would be Richie’s worst fear realized.

Eddie doesn’t think he can live with that.

Or maybe that’s the wrong decision. Maybe it’s the sunk cost fallacy. Eddie’s a risk analyst. He should know when he’s well past the point he should cut and run. His eyes dart away from Stan’s gaze.

He can’t make himself speak. Even if he could, he isn’t sure which side he’d fall on.

“It’ll get all of us if we run,” Bev’s voice cracks through the group. “I’ve seen it.”

And, well, that decides it for all of them.

* * *

Back at the Townhouse, his phone has finally stopped buzzing, meaning Myra has gone to sleep. Eddie doesn’t open any of the messages, definitely doesn’t listen to the voicemails, but types a succinct text that just says _Safe in Derry._ He’s sure it won’t satisfy her and he’s even more sure it’s a lie, but she deserves the courtesy. He unpacks his first suitcase, cursing his-alcohol dulled coordination and turns over his pill bottles one after the other, looking for any counter-indications with alcohol. When he finds that includes most of them, he rubs at his head and thinks of all the diseases that are exacerbated by an over-taxed liver.

But despite the part of his brain that’s berating himself for drinking when really alcohol contributes to just about every problem up to and including not fleeing this fucking town the second he head the name _Pennywise_ he can’t bring himself to regret it.

That will probably come with the hangover tomorrow morning, Myra’s wake-up call and the return of his common sense.

He fumbles with the cap on one of the pill vials, not quite up to the child-proof packaging. He’s unsure if he’ll take them when he gets it open, or just flush the entire month’s worth down the toilet.

Then there’s a knock on his door. Eddie freezes for a second, still skittish from the clusterfuck at the restaurant, but the clown isn’t exactly the type to use a polite knock as a scare tactic. There’s no peephole, but when he steels himself and opens the door, Stan’s standing there, shifting side to side. He has a pillow clutched loosely against his chest, looking exactly like his thirteen year old self.

“Stan,” Eddie says.

“I promised my wife I wouldn’t be alone tonight,” Stan replies, but doesn’t move from the door.

“Yeah, bro,” Eddie says after a second, moving to the side to let Stan come in. “Of course.”

Stan nods and moves inside, his face still lined with tension as he sits at the edge of Eddie’s bed. Eddie closes the door behind them and after a second, twists the deadbolt into place and then adds the chain lock. He feels wrong-footed. When they were kids, he might have expected this from Richie who had more than once snuck into Eddie’s childhood bedroom for a sleepover, and later, Bev who would lean a shoulder against his as they whispered about their parents, finding comfort in the fact that they weren’t alone.

But even back when there’d only been the four of them, Stan and Eddie weren’t the types to seek each other out. Bill had threaded them all together and Richie had applied the glue. Eddie and Stan were the extremities, still part of the same whole, but not necessarily essential to each other.

Eddie tosses the pill bottle in the direction of his suitcase and sits down next to Stan, their shoulders not quite touching.

“How much did you tell your wife?” he asks.

“Everything,” Stan says, still clutching the pillow to his chest. “Yours?”

“Nothing at all,” Eddie admits.

Stan’s gaze drifts to the collection of pill bottles next to the suitcase. He nods once, and that almost breaks Eddie. Because of course Stan knows. Eddie’s always been sick.

But there’s something buried in his half-remembered childhood, something that he’s afraid to look at because it invalidates so much of his adult life. The possibility (certainty) that he’s never been—

“I almost didn’t come back,” Stan says. “It wasn’t your fault. Any of you. It was just… I saw the number and I started to remember and I thought, maybe, the best thing I could do was to take myself off the board.”

Eddie hears the inflection in the last few words and finds himself picking out the tiny dotted scars from Pennywise’s teeth speckling Stan’s face in a near-perfect circle. He’d seen more than all of them except maybe Bev. And…

“Fuck you, dude,” Eddie spits. “Take yourself off the board? What is that shit?”

Stan startles, but he’d come to Eddie out of all of them, so he had to know, any support he got would be abrasive at best. Eddie would scream rather than console, push rather than hug.

“I don’t want to be the reason one of you don’t make it out,” Stan says, almost defensively. “If I freeze…”

“What?” Eddie says, “Like I did?”

That silences Stan for a moment. Eddie doesn’t remember everything from the sewers, but he remembers that much. The moment the clown had mentioned Richie, he’d had that ballooning moment of hope. And suddenly killing the clown had meant admitting Richie was gone.

Eddie hadn’t been ready to face that.

“It was all of us,” Stan offers quietly. “We thought he might still be alive. And it was worth the chance. We were always better when we were together.”

“Better together,” Eddie says, “there you fucking go. We need you. We need everyone.”

Stan nods, his grip on the pillow loosening. Eddie grabs it from his hands and tosses it back on the bed, an unspoken invitation to share for the night. Stan takes his cue and pulls himself under the cover and after a few seconds, Eddie crawls into the other side.

Neither one of them make a move to turn out the lights, but Stan’s breath evens out into snores. He thinks about the last time he saw Richie, outside the Neibolt house as his mom screeched at his friends. He thinks about how Stan told his wife _everything_ and Eddie barely remembered to text his. He thinks, as he drifts off, that it’s been a long time since he fell asleep next to someone. Myra and he had separate bedrooms, which provided a much more consistent sleep with less interruption. But this is nice, hearing signs of life next to him. It’s been a while since he didn’t feel alone.

* * *

Splitting up was a fucking terrible idea.

Eddie’s clutching the inhaler in his shaking fingers, black goo dripping down his cheeks. The sunlight feels oversaturated and the town is almost preternaturally empty despite the harsh light of mid-morning. He shakes the inhaler habitually, and has to stop himself from taking a dose.

Because he doesn’t need it.

He’s never needed it.

It’s the revelation that he’d refused to look at all last night and it has him shaking and angry in a way that leaves little room for fear. The goddamn clown had taken Richie, had turned Eddie back into this sick, weak thing and even _knowing that_ he still feels his brain yelling at him to get clean as fast as he can.

He consciously does not wipe at the Leper’s vomit on his face, but it feels like it might as well be acid against his skin.

And all of this bullshit might not even be enough to beat the clown.

They still need Richie’s token.

Eddie stops walking and looks up.

The arcade is in front of him, years out of business by the looks of it. His phone buzzes in his pocket and he pulls it out absently, only to dismiss the text notification from Myra.

This is where Richie’s token would be. This is where Richie would have spent the summer if he wasn’t talking to the rest of the Losers. If Eddie had been allowed out of the house, he would have been right there next to him, using a sanitizing wipe before touching any of the controls, but gleefully mashing buttons as he trash talked his friend.

There are boards blocking the arcade’s entrance, but the door gives when Eddie tries it and he’s able to slip past them and get inside. It’s clear from the start that he’s not the first one who managed it. His feet crunch against broken glass and graffiti splashes against all the walls. For the most part, the remaining game consoles are depowered and busted beyond repair.

The one except being a game in the far corner. Eddie finds himself moving towards it almost without conscious decision. The body is black all the way around with a joystick and a few red buttons on the deck. The title is in a bold blood red: NO RETURN.

Eddie recognizes it.

Of course he does. A horror game, a fresh delivery in the summer of ’89. Richie had dared him to play more than once, but Eddie always refused, too scared of the usual shit show that was life in Derry to bother injecting it into fiction.

He doesn’t know if Richie ever played it without him. If he’d talked Stan, Bill or Bev into playing with him after Eddie had refused. He might have just defaulted to street fighter like he always did.

Eddie pulls out his phone and calls Stan who picks up on the second ring.

“Eddie,” Stan says, out of breath. “Fuck, the painting. I mean. _Fuck,_ Eddie, what are we doing here?”

“Did you find your token?” Eddie asks, moving towards the game.

“Yeah,” Stan huffs. “I think I did.”

“That’s good. Me, too.” The screen is blinking, asking for a second player. One of the character icons is already grayed out. Eddie peers around the corner of the game, looking for an outlet, but the plug is clearly not connected. He swallows hard. “Hey, Stan, did you know I don’t have asthma?”

“Yeah.” Stan lets out a shuddering breath. “You told all of us. You figured it out that summer.”

Eddie nods to himself, an odd ringing in his ears. Tinnitus. An odd symptom to have in the absence of sudden loud noises. “I think I saw the clown. It looked like a leper for me.”

“Where are you?” Stan demands. There’s a note of urgency in his voice that wasn’t there before. “We’ve got our tokens. We’re supposed to go back and meet the others.”

“I think I can find Richie’s token.” Eddie reaches for the game. “We need it, too. Don’t we?”

“Eds,” Stan pleads.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” Eddie snaps.

“Eddie,” Stan corrects. “Tell me where you are.”

“The arcade,” Eddie answers. “I’m about to do something potentially very stupid.”

He pushes the joystick right to a random character selection and hits button to join the game. 

* * *

Eddie realizes two things immediately.

  1. He’s not in the arcade anymore.
  2. He’s lost at least a foot in height.



He looks down at his hands and doesn’t see a wedding ring. He’s also not covered in leper vomit, so this might actually be a net win. The room looks… he glances around. There are posters on the wall, but the writing is blurred. In fact, everything farther than his hands in front of his face is that same soft blur.

 _Vision loss_ , the voice in his head nags at him, _is potentially symptomatic of…_

He pushes the voice away. He’s not _sick._ This has Derry bullshit written all over it. He swipes his bedside table and comes up with a pair of glasses that he unceremoniously shoves onto his nose and frowns as the place swims back into focus. He makes a move straight for the mirror.

And… okay, that’s not him. That’s not even him age thirteen. The boy in the mirror has dirty blond hair and blue eye. His clothes are dark, his face sallow, but when Eddie raises a hand, the boy responds in kind. He squeezes his eyes shut. “Fucking clown bullshit.”

He’s in the video game. It makes as much sense as anything else in this fucking town. And… he’s actually pretty sure he can do this. It’s not like he stopped playing video games after Richie disappeared. It was one of his few interests his mother didn’t actively discourage. Especially after home consoles rendered the arcade and its cesspool of bacteria unnecessary.

On the table by the mirror is an open diary because horror game protagonists are always logging shit that scares him, building a list of clues even though they won’t help. Eddie picks it up and skims the notes with a sinking gut.

_Yellow raincoat. Red balloon._

_I think he’s still alive._

And he knows that story. It’s Bill’s story. Bill and Georgie. The story that got them into this mess.

He turns the page, not really expecting more notes except the next page says _Days grounded_.

It’s followed by two pages of tally marks. Eddie doesn’t count them, but he has to think that it’s well over a year. He turns the page again and in a shaky hand is a single sentence: _Something is wrong with Mom._

All of the other pages are empty.

He hears a crash from downstairs and bites in a sharp gulp of air. He snaps the diary shut and looks around the room until he finds a book bag. He shoves the diary inside and pulls open every drawer he can find looking for something useful. It nets him a flashlight with a spare pack of batteries. A map labelled ‘sewers,’ a roll of gauze and an orange vial labelled ‘painkillers.’ He almost leaves the pills behind, because with his luck it’s strong enough opioids to knock his suddenly preteen self on his ass.

When his backpack is loaded, he tries the window, but that doesn’t work because there fucking _bars_ on his window.

He backs away, his breath picking up with panic as he hears heavy footsteps moving towards his door. He thinks for a moment about diving under the bed, but that’s definitely the first place a monster would look. His moment of paralyzing indecision doesn’t work out and he winds up pressing himself up against the hinged side of the door.

The door creaks as it opens, but thank god for horror game ambiance because at least it opens slowly. Eddie shoves his fist in his mouth trying to stifle his panicked breathing as a shadow moves from the door.

At first blush, it looks human enough. It might even be the same shape as his mother, but there’s no color to it at all. It’s just a seething mass of black, the shadow a person who had haunted most of Eddie’s childhood. She moves forward, with hitching steps and bends to look under the bed, the shadows around her face swimming like the rest of the room. Eddie eases his way in front of the door, carefully to keep his eyes on the monster.

He trips on the transition strip in the doorway and Eddie gets the briefest impression of _teeth_ before he spins and sprints down the stairs. He stumbles on the bottom step, but catches himself with his hands and keeps moving even as the thing roars behind him.

The front door opens and Eddie sprints off the porch, his bare feet slapping against sidewalk and almost runs into a gangly boy with curly red hair who stares and him with wide eye before his attention flickers to the monster oozing out of the house. He lifts what has to be an industrial strength flashlight and turns it on the shadow thing.

Eddie stares up at him. “What the actual fuck is going on?”

The boy smiles, throws on an atrocious accent and says, “Come with me if you want to live.”

“Don’t fucking quote Terminator at me,” Eddie spits. “And if you do, why use the fucking Kyle Reese voice? Gotta go with Arnold.”

In response, the smile stretches until it looks almost giddy and Eddie… doesn’t want to unpack that. Not when that _thing_ could still be around every corner. The boy grabs Eddie’s hand tugs him forward and Eddie goes with him the two of them weaving towards the outskirts of a town that looks almost like Derry and up an uneven wooden ladder into a treehouse that looks somehow exactly like their clubhouse.

It’s only then, in the strange gray light of the world at night that the boy turns to look at him. “You’re different.”

He leans close enough that Eddie can see the splash of freckles against his pale face, framed by the unfamiliar weight of glasses still perched precariously on Eddie’s nose.

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, feeling the boy’s breath on his cheek. “We just met.”

“No, I’ve been watching that house almost since I came here.” The boy’s eyes narrow, his nose wrinkling in concentration. “Same thing happens every night. The monster poisons you. And you don’t run. It keeps feeding you every night until you turn into a shadow just like the other thing in the house.”

Eddie pushes the other boy away. “Fuck off, I’m not a monster.”

“It cycles. Just about everything here does.” The cocks his head sideways, putting on a voice, a British guy. “Regular as clockwork, good sir. Everything in its place.”

The accent is atrocious, all the worst stereotypes filtered through a person who’s never met someone English in his life.

And…

Eddie recognizes it.

“Richie?” he asks, his voice wavering.

The boy answers, sounding equally unsteady: “Eds?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you didn't notice, this is a Jumanji fusion.  
> I REGRET NOTHING.  
> (Mostly because it's too much work to regret everything)


	2. Chapter 2

Eddie’s not sure who moves first, but suddenly they’re clinging to each other with enough force to bruise. Even when it all came back, Eddie never thought he’d have this again. Bev’s survival had been their one and only miracle that summer. Eddie, clawing his way out of the sewer, dripping graywater, had been sure of it. Richie was the last child missing in the summer of ‘89 and unlike Bill and Georgie, Eddie had _known_ he was dead.

“I knew you guys wouldn’t leave me here,” Richie sobs. “It tried to make me think…”

Eddie feels his own grip loosen.

“I can’t believe you’re here.” Richie pulls away, almost sheepish, swiping at the eyes. He takes a deep breath. “And since when did Arnold say _come with me if you want to live?_ I’ve _seen_ Terminator, like, a hundred times.”

“They made a sequel,” Eddie answers. “Arnold’s a good guy. Linda Hamilton got scary jacked. You’d love it. Why are we talking about Terminator?”

“Because I haven’t gotten to talk to anyone in months! All the people in here, they’re part of the game. They’ve only got like two responses and that’s only if you catch them at _just_ the right moment. You’re normally like that, too. But look at you!” He darts forward and pinches Eddie’s cheek. “You’re my Eds!”

Before Eddie can swat his hand away, Richie’s face goes white and he takes two shaky steps backwards. “Unless you’re not.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What if this is a trick!” Richie’s eyes dart side to side. “ _It_ tries to get up here sometimes, but you! I just let you in.”

“Do I look like the clown?” Eddie asks.

Richie winces and, _oh fuck_ , Eddie hadn’t even considered that. The clown had mostly looked like a leper for him. For Stan it had been an old painting, but he remembers Bev saying it had once looked like her Dad. Bill’s assertion was that it looked like whatever scared you. Eddie’s stomach turns over as he realizes the implications. That at some point, Eddie had _scared_ his friend.

“Fuck,” Eddie says. “Fuck, Richie, it’s me. I swear. If it were the clown, if it were trying to fool you, why make me look like this?”

He gestures at his countenance, the too-young body, the wire rimmed glasses, the dirty blond hair.

He thinks he’s made a mistake for a moment, thinks he shouldn’t have called attention to the differences. That what Richie needs right now is comfort and familiarity. Eddie has no idea how time works in a game like this, but Richie has been in here for _years._

Alone.

“I don’t know,” Richie says after a second. “Short, loud, _cute_. There’s a resemblance.”

He doesn’t move closer, instead hugging his arms to his chest. And that’s wrong, too. Him and Richie, they’d always been tactile, shoving, jostling, teasing and _touching._ Eddie’s never had that with anyone other than the Losers. Not even the memory of Bev stroking a hand through his hair or Ben wrapping him in a tight hug feels close to the sheer _ease_ he’d had with Richie as a kid.

His mother had touched him as a kid, a hand on the forehead to check his temperature, the dry press of her lips on his cheek. He’d stopped allowing it when he realized he’d never been sick and as for Myra… well, Eddie’s been unlearning touch ever since Richie disappeared.

And it seems that Richie has done the same.

Eddie forces a laugh. It’s unconvincing even to his own ears. “You know I hit a growth spurt, right? I’m probably taller than you now. How’d you end up looking like this? I mean don’t get me wrong, fake you looks like less of a gangly moron than real you, but…”

The joke seems enough to jar Richie from his panic spiral and he blinks hard before spinning on his heels, his arms outstretched. “Don’t like it? I picked it special.”

“In the game?” Eddie asks. He’s pretty sure he’d hit the randomizer. “Why?”

There’s a brief moment where Richie draws in on himself, but it’s gone in an instant and he flings his hands wide and says, “Can’t you tell, my good fellow?”

“I’m definitely not talking to the British guy right now,” Eddie retorts.

Richie drops his hands. “It looked like Bev, okay?”

Eddie squints at him. “Bev’s a girl.”

“Bev’s cooler than _all of us put together,_ ” Richie says. “If you were going to pick one of us to play in an action game, you know Bev’s clearly the one to go with.”

“Mike,” Eddie starts, mostly for the sake of being contrary.

“Mike’s a total dreamboat,” Richie mock coos. “But Bev could kick his ass. I want to be her when I grow up.”

Eddie thinks of the careful way Bev adjusted her sleeves at dinner. Of the briefest hesitation before letting herself be pulled into a hug.

He thinks of how little that changes about his respect for her. How she’d been the one caught in the clown’s deadlights and she’d been the one trying to swing for the kill in the sewers. “That’s fair.”

“If I’d know I was signing up for the body, I might have been a little more careful. I mean, it’s pretty hard to judge dick size from a headshot, but—“

“Beep beep, dude,” Eddie cuts in.

It’s a testament to how long Richie’s been alone that the beep beep doesn’t stop him. “I am pleased to confirm that was one thing I got to take with me from the outside.”

“Seriously, Richie, _beep beep._ I don’t want to hear about your dick.”

It takes a second, but Richie’s unfamiliar face clouds. “Sorry man, haven’t heard that one in a while.”

He looks lost, the halo of red curls falling over his eyes. This version of him is already supplanting the one from Eddie’s threadbare memories. Eddie doesn’t remember the color of his friend’s eyes, just the pair of overlarge coke-bottle glasses. He thinks it might be almost as jarring to see Richie as an adult.

Eddie doesn’t know what to say after this long. Doesn’t think Richie would be interested in apologies or justifications about why it took so long for him to get here. Instead he clears his throat and says, “How do we get out of here, anyway?”

He’s not prepared for the way his words make Richie’s face fall. He’s quiet for a long moment and then in a voice that threatens to shatter he says, “If I knew the way out, I wouldn’t still be here.”

* * *

There’s not much to do after that. The proclamation turns Richie listless, the almost giddy energy at finding Eddie in the game fading completely. He puts on a show, sure, giving Eddie a tour of the treehouse even though it’s barely big enough for the two of them to stretch out on the floor. Eddie hands over the backpack with the supplies he’d grabbed from the room when he woke up. Richie takes it, making a joke about Eddie’s old fanny pack, and critiques the findings. He skims the diary with disinterest before tossing it aside, adds the gauze to his stash but hesitates when he sees the little orange vial of pills.

“What?” Eddie snaps. “Generic’s got identical active ingredients. Only real difference is in the binders. What’s the worst thing that can happen? That they’re p-”

Eddie cuts himself off. _Placebos_ are far from the worst possible outcome. He’s read stories before about illict pills ordered online. Xanax cut with some weird designer drug that could knock you out for days.

“Calm down, Eds,” Richie says. “I trust you on meds, but I don’t trust anything edible out of that house.”

They’d strung the entrance to their treehouse with trip wire. There’s a crude system of cans that will rattle an alarm if something tries to get in. Eddie doesn’t bother pointing out that it won’t much help. There’s only one real entrance. Richie undoubtedly knows this, but he seems to settle as he goes through the routine of setting the trap.

“She was really poisoning him?” Eddie asks.

“Yeah,” Richie says. “I tried to stop it a couple times, but it never worked.” He lets out a quiet huff and digs through what looks like a homemade chest before producing a pillow and tossing it to Eddie. “More than a couple times, if I’m honest. He reminded me of you.”

Eddie clutches the pillow to his chest. It’s old and lopsided and if you keep a pillow more than two years, the weight can be almost a _third_ dust mites and their droppings. Shit like that, it’s a known contributor to childhood asthma that—

That Eddie definitely doesn’t have.

Fuck. Eddie’s mom never tried to poison him or anything, but he can still hear her voice in his head, spiking his anxiety, making him think…

Richie lies down next to him, back flat against the wooden boards of the treehouse. It’s a warm night despite a soft whistle of wind through the air. Eddie squeezes his eyes shut, forcing thoughts of dust mites out of his head and says, “Don’t you have a spare?”

“Spare pillow?” Richie folds his hands behind his head. “Nah. Never needed it. You still gotta let me play host, though. Isn’t every day I have guests in my humble abode.”

Eddie shifts his head sideways on the pillow, a clear indication that Richie should try to take the other side. Even as small as he is right now, their shoulders make it almost impossible to fit comfortably. After a brief hesitation, Richie takes the invitation, turning on his side so he can look at Eddie. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

Eddie can’t believe he’s back in Derry at all. Much less stuck, impossibly, in a video game with his childhood best friend next to him. It’s the second time in as many nights he’s gone to sleep next to someone that isn’t his wife and with a pang of guilt, he realizes he can’t remember the last time he felt this comfortable sharing space with another person. Might have been the club house, years ago, climbing in next to Richie for the sole purpose of knocking his glasses off with his feet.

He wonders, when he lost it. The closeness, the need for touch. He’d been a clingy shit when he was a kid. With all of the Losers, really, but with Richie especially who would not only respond, but _escalate._

Richie is still staring at him with those unfamiliar eyes, his breath warm, on Eddie’s cheeks. Eddie doesn’t want to close his eyes, because that was what happened last time. He blinked and Richie was _gone_. 

“This is literally the best thing that’s happened to me in months,” Richie says. “You getting stuck in here with me. And that’s terrible because you were out in there yesterday and—”

“Still got a clown problem out there,” Eddie notes. “But we can get out of here together. We probably just have to beat the game.”

Richie laughs but his face doesn’t, his forehead pinched, his eyes worried. “You ever try to beat an arcade game?”

Eddie has, of course, tried to beat an arcade game. But no matter how far he got in something like Galaga or Defender there was always another space ship coming for him. He thinks some of the shooters might have an endgame, or at least a way to beat a _mission_ , but even with those, he’d always run out of quarters well before he got there.

“We can beat it,” Eddie says stubbornly. “Go to sleep already. I’m not leaving you here.”

“Sure thing, Eds,” Richie replies.

He sounds unconvinced, but Eddie’s too tired to argue.

* * *

They drift closer through the night, same way they always did as kids. Richie has octopus tendencies and Eddie is half afraid that Richie will disappear again. He wakes up to find Richie’s head on his shoulder, snoring into his ear. When he’s not snoring, he’s mumbling nonsense, against Eddie’s neck. Bill always used to say it was impossible to sleep while Richie was around, and while kid Eddie never minded, adult Eddie kind of sees his point.

He doesn’t hold a grudge about it, though. Not today. He knows his own paranoid brain well enough to anticipate the kind of horrors it will throw at him if he manages to make it through a REM cycle. This is terrible for his body and the ground will do no favors to his back, but lying in the dark next to Richie is the only thing that’s managed to calm him down since he got back to Derry. 

“Merrifeld rakes the prime minister,” Richie slurs.

“Fucking weirdo,” Eddie replies as his fingers seek the pulse point on Richie’s wrist. “I can’t believe you’re alive.”

Holding his fingers against the thrumming pulse, Eddie falls back asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

When he wakes up, it’s still dark outside and Richie’s flitting around the tree house, shoving supplies into a backpack. Eddie still has a patch of drool wet on his shoulder so Richie can’t have been up for long. Eddie sits, up frowning at the blur until Richie presses a pair of glasses into his hands. Eddie accepts them with a frown. “Never going to get use to that.”

“Welcome to the four-eyed club,” Richie says. “You’ll miss them when they’re gone.”

“Why would I miss being half-blind you freak?” Eddie shoots back. “And since when are you the get up before dawn type.”

“We don’t really get dawn here.” Richie frowns. “It’s pretty twilight-gray all the time. You get used to it after a while. If you’re serious about trying to beat the game, this is the time to start.”

He offers Eddie a hand and pulls him to his feet, before slapping a flashlight into his other hands. “Okay, mechanics. Light is usually good, except for when it’s _bad_. Point the light at the monster and the monster will normally go away. Some monsters take more light to banish and the batteries only last so long.”

He puts a few extra batters in Eddie’s backpack along with a dozen rolls of gauze rolls.

“Health?” Eddie asks.

“Unfortunately not auto applied,” Richie answers. “Found that out the hard way last time I was banging your Mom.”

“My mom’s dead,” Eddie says.

Richie falters, a question forming on his lips and Eddie steels himself to give the answer. Richie undoubtedly knows he’s been in the game for while, but he suspects that neither of them are prepared to confront just how long it was.

“Are you okay?” Richie asks after a long pause.

“No,” Eddie answer. “I’m stuck in a fucking video game while my friends are outside being terrorized by a clown. Why would I be okay?”

“Fair,” Richie allows. “You mind giving me a second to mourn. I did just lose the love of my life.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie snaps reflexively. “That’s my dead mother you’re talking about.”

“I know.” Richie’s voice is full of feigned mourning. “You’re the only Kaspbrak left for me. Eds, we can console each other.”

Eddie laughs and after a second, Richie cracks. Eddie hates him so much, but he loves him, too. Loves him with a fierceness that he barely remembers. It floods his whole body, making him giddy with something other than fear. The two of them keep cackling at each other in the tiny little treehouse hideaway and outside, the game quakes, as if viscerally repulsed by their mirth.

Richie turns his head. “That’s never happened before.”

Adrenaline bolts through Eddie. “Is that good or bad?”

Richie shrugs and tugs open Eddie’s bag and stuffs the rest of his stockpile of gauze inside. He only keeps one roll for himself, but he does double up on flashlights and batteries. Eddie doesn’t comment.

“Cycle always starts the same way,” Richie says. “There’s a kid in a yellow rain slicker. You follow him because well…”

“He’s Georgie.” Eddie’s stomach twists.

“That’s right.” Richie looks down and zips up the backpack. “You follow him as long as you can. But the clown’s gonna grab him and drag him to the sewers. And they’ll be nothing you can do about it.”

“So why bother following?” Eddie asks. “I mean I’ve already got the map, let’s just head to the sewers.”

“First off, never thought I’d hear you gung ho to hit the sewers.”

“It’s not like you can get a staph infection in a video,” Eddie snaps and then thinks of the zombie game he’d played in an insomniac’s marathon one month when he and Myra were fighting. There was a lot of pus. He feels himself falter. “You _can’t_ get an infection in here, right?”

Richie slings on his own backpack, swinging Eddie’s into his chest. “Not sure. I’ve been fine, but I’ve also seen what comes out of your house. No promises.”

“Great,” Eddie mutters.

Richie undoes the line of cans that serves as his alarms and makes his way out of the tree house. Eddie follows after a moment, his hand trembling as descends the ladder. He stumbles on a loose branch when he hits the ground and trips into Richie’s back. He starts to yell and him for stopping, but Richie holds up a hand to quiet him.

“What are we waiting for?” Eddie hisses.

With the air of someone who’s done this a thousand times, Richie holds up three fingers. Then he drops it to two and with a flourish, one.

Out of the corner of Eddie’s eye, he sees a flash of yellow.

“Run,” Richie says.

Richie goes from zero to sixty in an instant, his arms pumping as they make their way through the trees, just a half second behind him. Despite the (non-existent) asthma, Eddie is the runner out of the two of them, outpacing his friends whenever he forgot to think about his breathing. But this Richie, the one who’d grown up between the gaps in Eddie’s memory has memorized the layout of the forest, his stride smooth and confident.

He’s done this before.

More than once.

Richie stutter-steps and leaps over a gully. Eddie, missing it completely trips and pitches forward, tumbling into the rocks. He feels a sharp bite of pain through his arm as it slams into the ground. Richie runs another dozen paces before realizing that Eddie’s fallen and doubles back. His eyes are wide as he crouches next to Eddie, focused on something over his shoulder.

In the distance, Eddie sees a flicker of a yellow rain slicker, hears a peel of childish laughter.

“Eds!” Richie says urgently. “Eds, we’ve got to run.”

The feeling just above his elbow is familiar. As is the sight of Richie crouching in front of him. He blinks and in an instant, he’s thirteen again, cradling a broken arm in the Neibolt house as Richie proclaims his intention to set it himself. Eddie can feel the words building in his throat, an echo of that old pain, _don’t fucking touch me_.

“My arm’s broken, dipshit,” Eddie snaps.

“Yeah.” Richie’s eyes flicker past him again. “An arm is not your legs. Chop chop. Still gotta run. We’ll fix it later.”

He hauls Eddie forcibly to his feet, his eyes trained past Eddie’s left ear. Eddie looks over his shoulder to see what has him so freaked out.

The forest is disappearing in shuddering breaths. The trees swallowed by darkness like the thing from the house where he woke up. He gapes at it for a second until Richie grabs him and spins him so he’s facing forward, his eyes automatically picking out the flashes of yellow in the distance.

“No return,” Richie says. “You fall again, you lose.”

They start moving again, Eddie gritting his teeth, his eyes watering forces his unfamiliar body to move as Richie whispers instructions about the pending obstacles in his path. _Left, duck, jump, power through. HARD right._

Eddie listens, grounding himself with the feeling of Richie’s hand on his back as they start gaining on the boy in the yellow rain jacket.

And then, suddenly, the forest gives way a suburban street and the boy in yellow is crouched next to a storm drain.

Eddie shouts, “Georgie!”

The boy looks up.

Eddie’s not sure if it’s actually Georgie. He barely remembers what Bill used to look like, much less his younger brother, but the boy’s round-faced and _little_ in a way that makes Eddie’s hands shake. Richie looks away.

“Come meet my new friend!” Georgie calls.

Which is when some _thing_ reaches out from the sewers and grabs him by the arm. Eddie can’t see much, just the impression of teeth and then blood splashed against the pavement. Eddie squeezes his eyes shut and buries his face in Richie’s shoulder so he doesn’t have to look. But he can still hears it, a child’s scream and the distant bubbling laughter of an unhinged clown.

“Eds,” Richie says, nudging him. “It’s okay, Eds. This is just how it starts.”

“How the fuck is that okay!” Eddie shouts. “How do we beat a game like this?”

“Wish I could say it gets better,” Richie reaches past him so he can slip a hand into Eddie’s backpack and grab one of the rolls of gauze.

Eddie’s adrenaline has started throttling down to leave his arm aching. He keeps it pressed into his chest, as stable as he can make it. “What the fuck do you think that is going to do?”

“If you want to try health care in this piece of shit game, be my guest, but if you’d like to enjoy literally the only perk…” He waves the gauze, eyebrow raised.

Eddie relents and forces himself to offer his arms to Richie who takes it gently and unwinds the roll of gauze. Eddie looks away, not wanting to watch the press of displaced bone against his skin. He can barely feel it as Richie applies the gauze, the fabric feather light against his skin.

The pain is suddenly gone. So completely that Eddie feels his mouth drop open. He rotates his arm, fascinated by the difference. The gauze seems to have evaporated as soon as it hit his skin and he’s definitely not hurt anymore.

Richie gives him a sheepish smile. “See, Eds. I always take care of you.”

“I had nerve damage from the last time you set one of my bones,” Eddie retorts. He’s only just put that fact together. The way a couple of his finger were permanently numb. He’d always thought it might have been sign of a _stroke_.

“If you can still jerk off it’s probably not worth bitching about.”

Eddie elbows him with the recently repaired arm and Richie overreacts at the contact, staggering dramatically sideways and right into a uniformed police officer.

He straightens up immediately, the slouch ironed out of his posture as he stands shoulder to shoulder with Eddie. “Officer.”

“You boys best be getting home.” The officer speaks with overly precise tones, his face barely moving. “Almost curfew.”

Eddie’s face scrunches up, because he literally woke up like thirty minutes ago. “What are you talking about curfew for? Did you not see the child pulled into the literal sewers?”

“Easy Eds,” Richie mutters.

“Easy?” Eddie turns his attention to the cop, standing on his toes because it’s always made him feel just a little bit taller. Richie used to coo about him like this: puffed up, angry, and barely more substantial than a bird. “How about you do your fucking job?”

The officer’s expression does not change.

He says, “You boys best be getting home.” There’s a pause before he finishes with identical inflection. “Almost curfew.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie yells, “are you mentally incompetent?”

Richie slings an arm over his shoulder to force Eddie to settle. “Of course, officer,” he answers. “We were just heading home.”

The officer fixes them with a hard glare and then walks off.

“What the _fuck_?” Eddie hisses.

“He’s part of the game,” Richie says. “He’s going to be by every ten minutes or so until we actually do go home. He's not the best conversationalist. If you go far enough, there’s one or two branches of the game where he’ll try to kill you.”

“Comforting.”

Richie rubs his neck awkwardly. “In the context of all the other shit, kind of, yeah.”

Eddie shakes his head. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“Go home.” Richie’s face is pinched and Eddie gets the distinct impression that this is the last thing Richie wants to do. “Play the game.”

“I don’t want to go back to this kid’s house! The thing in that house tried to _kill me_. I want to go back out there! To the clubhouse and the rest of the Losers!”

“This was your idea,” Richie counters. “We’ve got to play the game if we want to beat it.”

And he’s right.

Dammit, he’s _right._

* * *

Richie stops on the doorstep to Eddie’s game house. Eddie turns back to look at him, but he’s staring at his feet. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

“Really wish it worked like that,” Richie answers. “But it won’t end well.”

“Then I’ll stay at your place.”

Richie flinches. “Possibly an even worth idea. It’s okay, Eds. I’ll sneak over tonight. Promise.”

Eddie wavers on the doorstep and before he can second guess it, lunges forward and tugs Richie into a hug. “The last time I split up with the Losers I wound up sucked into a video game.”

“Can’t be all bad.” Richie hugs him back, hunching a little so he can rest his chin on top of Eddie’s head. “You found me.”

“Is that you, boy?” a voice calls from inside the house.

“It’s okay,” Richie says. “I’ll see you tonight. Promise.”

He gives Eddie one last squeeze and then turns on his heel, half-jogging down the street. Eddie steels himself and turns into the house. The same house where a monster chased him out yesterday. He shuts the door behind him, but leaves it unlocked. It sets his teeth on edge anyway. He wants no less than three escape options given the choice.

Looking around, he finds the house’s layout familiar.

It’s his childhood home. The décor, the color, the clutter. Even the _smell_. Antiseptic and his mother’s perfume. He gags on the scent, his stomach rolling.

“Is that a cough I hear, Edmund?”

Eddie starts at the name, half-sure he’d misheard. The name is wrong. But...

The voice is his mother’s.

The voice is _Myra’s_.

“Edward,” Eddie corrects and shakes his head because he hates his full name almost as much. “ _Eddie._ ”

“Don’t sass your mother.”

Eddie clenches and unclenches his fists. He’s played this part for most of his life. He knows the script and if playing the script will get him out of this house again, he’ll act out the fucking script. He just wants to get back to Richie.

He lowers his gaze and modulates his voice. “Sorry, Mommy.”

“You need to take better care of yourself,” she titters in a not-quite reply. “I made us dinner.”

Eddie slots into place at their cramped table. The television is in the corner, clearly on, but Eddie can’t make out a program. In front of him is a TV dinner, the plastic still over the tray. Eddie looks for a second, Richie’s warnings heavy in his head. Sealed probably makes it okay, but paranoia screaming at him, he swaps trays with the one at his mother’s place.

She doesn’t notice, settling down into a chair that protests her weight. She has none of Myra’s sweetness to her features, or his mother’s sharp-eyed meanness, but her features somehow echo them both. Eddie peels the plastic from the tray, carefully picking up his fork. The food is tasteless and heavy on his tongue, but Eddie manages to wash it all down with a swig of his water, methodically making his way through the meal.

There is no conversation over dinner and Eddie carefully does not watch the almost vicious way the monster across from him tears through her food. He finishes first, setting the fork delicately beside the empty tray and asks if he can go back outside.

The request is, of course, denied. The town has a curfew. Eddie’s going to have to survive another night in this house, waiting for the shadow-thing to emerge from this too-familiar woman across from him.

He trudges up the stairs without protest. His room is in the same place it was in his mother’s old house.

None of this is real. It _can’t_ be. He doesn’t want to be back here alone.

He stumbles through the door to his room, the scene suddenly twisting in front of him. He tries to take a gulp of air, but his lungs aren’t pulling air, just hitching as his chest deflates. White spots flash on the edges of his vision. And shit, this is poison, isn’t it? He remembers Richie saying not to trust anything edible out of this house, but when he’d swapped the TV dinners, he’d assumed he was safe.

 _Unless all the food is poison,_ a voice in Eddie’s head whispers. _After all, anything can kill in sufficient quantities._

Or it might not have even been something he ate.

The _water_. Fuck.

White swims in his vision.

He hadn’t even thought about the water.

His head hits the floor.

* * *

White.

Voices.

Someone familiar, but at the same time not.

Stan?

He tries to say the name.

 _Eddie_ , the voice is familiar, but distorted. He can’t tell if it’s directed at him.

He can’t breathe. He shouldn’t have drunk the water.

_He said he found a game._

Stan!

He tries to blink, clear his vision, but the white seems to grow even brighter, the color enough to leave traces of a taste against his tongue. Bitter and overwhelmingly chemical.

But that might be the water.

 _He would if he thought it was Richie,_ Stan says. Then there’s a long pause. _Even if we wanted to, it’s only two players. Both taken._

Eddie tries to frown, but he’s not sure he has a face right now. Which should be a good deal more concerning than missing half of Stan’s conversation.

 _If you make me say sucked into a video game—_ Stan sounds more tired than irritated.— _I swear I will let the clown eat you and go back to Atlanta._

Atlanta, Eddie thinks scornfully. He would literally rather live in Derry.

…Or New York, he corrects himself. That’s where his job and _wife_ are. His wife who looks just like the thing in the replica of his childhood home. The one who’d poisoned the water.

 _I don’t think the video game’s the problem so much as the deadlights._ Bev says, her voice crystal clear, as if she’s standing right next to him.

He’d be ecstatic to hear her except for the word _deadlights._

It’s in the box of things that he hasn’t let himself remember. Bev, her face pale and slack, her eyes so, so white, her mouth hanging open as she floated ten feet off the ground.

He feels sick, except he’s not sick. It was the water.

He…

Wakes up in an uncannily familiar bed, a hand pressed against his forehead.

“I’ll take care of you,” the monster whispers in Myra’s voice. “Shh.”

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut and pretends he’s asleep again.


	4. Chapter 4

Eddie waits until the thing leaves, trailing shadows out the door to his room and throws the covers off of him. Standing gives him a rush of vertigo, the room spinning slowly, his vision doubling every time he blinks. The backpack with Richie’s stockpile is still by the door downstairs, along with the flashlight.

Leaning against the wall, he feels his way towards the door and then slips out of the room. He can hear the monster downstairs, can see the dark echo of her footprints like smoke against the carpet. He turns left, banking on his memory of his childhood and pushes himself into the bathroom. There’s wallpaper on the walls, a forest print that blends into the wooden cabinetry. Eddie hates it. He misses the polished white of his bathroom back home. The way you can _see_ every speck of dust.

He catches himself on the sink as he enters the room and retches for a second. No vomit, but a thin trail of spit drips into the beige sink fixture.

It’s black and thick, the same consistency as the leper’s projectile vomit, which sets his mind catastrophizing about contagions, the white flashing on the edges of his vision like the low health warnings in the video games that Myra doesn’t know he plays.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and throws open the medicine cabinet.

Row after row of pills. Not unlike his medicine cabinet back home. His vision still spinning, he takes one off the top row and twists it open. He hesitates, staring at the chalky blue pills and then upends them into the toilet. Vision still swimming, he does the same with the second bottle and then the third. It doesn’t do a thing to cure the throbbing headache or the double vision, but he feels giddy, euphoric.

He’s not sick. Someone did this to him.

He’s never been sick.

The medicine cabinet empty, he tries the drawers under the sink and then he finds it, a roll of gauze like all the ones that Richie had stuffed into his backpack. Feeling ridiculous, he takes a deep breath and winds the entire roll around his left palm.

He closes his eyes, willing the white to fade from the edges of his vision.

When he opens them again, the bandage is gone, and so is his headache. The room steadies in front of him. He lets out a long breath. He’s not sick. He’ll continue surviving the same way he had the summer he lost Richie.

He’ll be _better,_ even, because he’s got Richie back.

He opens the other two drawers out of curiosity. One is completely empty. The second holds nothing but an inhaler.

Eddie picks it up and turns it over in his hand. It’s a different color from his one back home, the one that was just medicine flavored water in an aerosol. Which means that this one might be genuine. A red plastic actuator rather than his standard blue. He shakes it, spins it outward, and primes it.

Some of the aerosol hits the toilet paper and sizzles.

Eddie leans closer to examine, breathing out in shock. “Holy shit.”

It might have been a placebo out here, but in here it’s battery acid. He can’t imagine what it would have done to his lungs. He feels his stomach turn over and bends close to the toilet just in cases, but either it’s impossible to vomit in the game or he’s got better control than he expected. In the toilet bowl, the pills from the medicine cabinet are slowly disintegrating, the bindings loosened by water anything insoluble turned to a white powder.

A knock on the bathroom door redirects his attention. He eyes the simple push button lock that wavers as the monster tries the handle.

“Occupied!” Eddie screeches.

“It’s not safe for you in there alone,” the monster coos in Myra’s voice.

Eddie glances around. No windows in the bathroom. One way out. Through a monster that’s already tried to kill him once tonight. He shakes the inhaler, his heartbeat rabbiting in his ears.

“If you’re sick, let Mommy take care of you.”

And then all at once, anger overwhelms the fear. He’s not sick. He’s never been. He turns the inhaler over in his hand and then points it outwards and opens the door.

He pumps the actuator three times before even sees the monster. It doesn’t scream when the inhaler’s output hits, but rather whimpers. The sound Myra makes when she’s feigning tears, trying to guilt him into skipping the afternoon happy hour with his coworkers.

The sound makes him look at the monster, but when he does, all he can see is his mother’s face contorted in agony as the acid eats away at her flesh.

“Sorry, Mommy!” Eddie says, slipping past the monster’s shoulder at a dead run. The place where his shoulder brushes against the thing feels strange, like her agony must be contagious, but Eddie refuses to believe that. He is not hurting because she is. He is not sick because she says so.

He descends the stairs and a dead sprint, ducking a shoulder to reach low enough to slot an arm through one of the straps of his backpack and sling it onto his back. Behind him he hears a terrific noise, but doesn’t look, doesn’t want to see the thing that is not his mother, that is not Myra, stampeding down the stairs.

He hits the front door.

Locked.

His fingers dive for the deadbolt, his breath hitching as he turns it. Behind him, the footsteps crescendo.

“Who will keep you safe, Edmund?”

But his name is not Edmund. He’s Eddie. He’s never been safe, not once in his life, but he doubts a cage will help.

The deadbolt twists. Eddie opens the door enough to twirl himself through, grabbing the doorknob on the other side so he can pull it shut.

Eddie backpedals, stumbles and hits the ground, the seat of his pants suddenly damp with the dew. The grayness of their flight through the woods has ceded to the dark of night. He sits huffing on the grass, watching the front door as his heartbeat throttles back to normal. The door shudders but doesn’t open.

 _That’s right you fucker,_ Eddie thinks viciously, _I’ve locked you in this house. You won’t get out unless I let you out._

He looks at the inhaler, still clenched in his hand and pushes himself slowly to his feet. He adjusts the backpack so that he’s got both straps on and puts the inhaler into the pocket of his jeans. He sets off down the darkened street, his feet taking him in the direction that would have him at Richie’s house in a few minutes.

Only when he gets to what should be the Tozier’s house, something stops him. There’s a light on in the upper window. Eddie skids to a halt as he sees the figure moving in the room.

It looks like Richie. The dim one from Eddie’s memory, pasty skin, limbs too big to fit his frame, the shaggy dark hair. Eddie cups a hand to his mouth, intent on shouting for him, but there’s movement and suddenly a second figure emerges, standing just a little too close. They stare at each other for a long moment and then the shorter boy lunges up. Eddie winces, expecting an attack, but it’s _not_.

Richie stands stunned for a second as the other boy backs up, looking side to side as if he needs an escape route. Then he leans forward himself and kisses the other boy back.

Eddie’s eyes widen as they go at it. He feels something tight in his chest, completely different from the terror he’d felt only moments ago. He keeps watching, his brain darting around the fact that the smaller boy looks a lot like Eddie at age thirteen. He’s so entranced that he almost doesn’t realize when it goes wrong.

At some points the boys have spun so that Richie’s face is clearly visible. Only he has no face that Eddie can see. Behind the glasses is just a blank patch of pale skin, instead of a nose, a flat white expanse. Eddie has no idea if either boy has a mouth because what he can see of it is covered in blood.

“Enjoying the show, Eds?” a voice asks.

Eddie spins, inhaler out of his pocket, pointed outwards.

Richie gives him a close-lipped smile. “Relax, it happens every night. Pennywise is just fucking with me.”

Eddie’s brow furrows, but before he can ask, Richie puts a hand on either shoulder, affecting a proud parent’s persona. “Look at you, Eds. Survived your first boss battle.”

“I can’t believe you made me go into that house alone.”

“You know I would have gone with you, but that’s not how the game works. I had my own shit to fight.”

And it looks like he might have literally meant fight. There’s a blossoming bruise over his right eye, the thing rapidly swelling shut. Eddie has no idea if he can see. “And the thing mascaraing as your dad beat the shit out of you?”

Richie bobs his head.

Eddie shrugs out of his backpack and grabs one of the rolls of gauze from inside. “Sit down.”

“Don’t waste one of those on me. You might need them later.”

“You need them now,” Eddie counters. “Sit the fuck down.”

Richie acquiesces, his face smoothing out as Eddie manhandles him to a sitting position and prods gently at the growing bruise. His fists open and close against his jeans but he doesn’t flinch at the contact. “Easy, Dr. K.”

Eddie rolls the gauze so that it starts at the bottom of his chin and wrapped around the crown of his head. He does it a couple extra times for good measure, tighter than necessary so that it would be hard to talk. Richie realizes the same thing making overly exaggerated close-mouthed noises until the bruising starts to fade from his face and the bandages dissolve.

“We’re not splitting up again,” Eddie informs him. “I almost died and you got the shit beat out of you. Unacceptable.”

“You were worried about me.” Richie clutches his hands to his chest. “Eds, babe, I can take care of myself.”

“I’ve been worried about you for _years_ ,” Eddie snaps. “I get that this fucked up game means we might get hurt, but I don’t want you getting hurt _alone_.”

Richie stares at him for a moment, his eyes wide, a soft smile on his face. He looks impossibly, genuinely, fond. Eddie has break the eye contact. He can’t handle Richie looking at him like that. Not when he left him stuck in a game for _twenty-seven years_.

When Eddie looks away Richie is quick to break the silence. “You know I as worried about you, too, right? I mean I saw the game flicker. I was afraid the loop was about to reset.”

Eddie frowns. “Loop? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You really think I haven’t tried to beat the game myself?” Richie drums a finger on his knees. “That’s about all I do. I don’t think you can beat it. You just get to the end. And the clown or your _mom_ or a fucking stray Pomeranian gets you and then your vision goes completely white and just… you can’t really continue, so you start a new game.”

“But it’s a choice?” Eddie asks, fascinated.

“If you don’t start over, what do you think happens, Eds? I’m not giving permission for the clown to take me out forever if I call it quits.”

“H-h-how many loops have you done?” Eddie needs to know the answer. Eddie never wants to hear the answer.

Richie looks away. “I stopped counting.”

Fuck. Eddie had been hoping it was some kind of status in here. That his friend hadn’t been running through Pennywise’s hoops for damn near three decades. He reaches out, unsure of what else to do and settles his hand on the side of Richie’s cheek. Richie leans into the contact, his eyes half lidden before they suddenly bolt wide, his focus trained on the boys in the upper window of the house. He scrambles backwards, his arms hugged close to his chest, his unfamiliar face twisted in panic. Eddie follows his gaze, flabbergasted at what might cause this kind of a reaction.

There is only one boy in the window now. It’s the one that looks like Richie used to, pale skin, dark hair. There are still no, eyes, no nose, just a mouth, filled with jagged, bloodied teeth.

In his hands, is a headless corpse.

“Jesus,” Eddie yelps.

“They do that sometimes,” Richie says his tone an unnerving echo of the empty policeman just a few hours ago. “This place is fucked up. It’s fine. Tell me you grabbed your token before you made it out of your personal nightmare.”

Eddie shakes himself, trying to reestablish the image of the boys kissing in his mind. He very much prefers that one to the gristly end.

“Eds!” Richie snaps a finger in front of his face. “Come on, token. Did you grab one?”

“Mike wanted me to find a token, too,” Eddie says.

“Mike’s got a token?” Richie asks. “Wait, is that why you ended up in here?”

“That’s right,” Eddie deadpans. “You were my token all along.”

“I’m touched, really, but that’s probably not going to help us fight in game monsters.”

Eddie rolls his eyes and pulled his inhaler out of his pocket.

Richie gives a low whistle. “Haven’t seen that bad boy in a while.”

“It’s battery acid,” Eddie says. “It’s how I got out of the house. That’s the only thing I grabbed outside the backpack.”

“Fuck.” Richie tugs a key out from a chain he’s wearing around his neck. Eddie has a flash of the one Bev used to wear all summer. “You bought a weapon and I just managed this shitty key. No wonder I haven’t beat the game before this.”

“What’s the key for?”

“Getting into the sewers.” Richie says, tucking the key back under his shirt. “You can spritz Pennywise with your inhaler. You know, if we get that far.”

Richie looks up at the window again, his face inscrutable. Eddie hates the look, doesn’t want to deal with his own fascination and fear, so he shoves Richie hard enough snare his focus. “Thinking about cheating on my mom, you prick?”

“Nah,” Richie pastes on a smile that doesn’t match his wistful tone. “Mrs. K. was the only woman for me.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for homophobic language/internalized homophobia in this one. If you're in the IT fandom, you're probably fine, but it's worth a mention.
> 
> Also, this is a whole day early. Happy apocalypse, everyone. Wash your hands.

They walk in silence.

Eddie hates it. It reminds him of his youth. His mother’s house with only the television going. Myra’s cold shoulder when he was late for dinner. Richie never used to be silent. As an adult, Eddie can see the ways it was covering up the cracks in his own demeanor. Eddie had done the same thing as a kid, yelling to drown out the paranoia his mother installed in his head.

As adult he’s gotten used to the simmering resentment of his wife over a silent dinner. Become a master at waiting through the silences at his client meetings as his simple statements about worst case scenario land and then take on a life of their own. His childhood need to fill the silence with noise has seeped out of him over the years and he _resents_ it.

If he’d had the memories needed to imagine a reunion with Richie after twenty plus years, he wouldn’t have conjured this, the two of them strolling through the darkened streets of this pseudo-Derry, each and every year of silence stretched between them.

He wonders if it’s the scene in the house. The two faceless boys kissing each other. Killing each other. The ones that looked like…

“So, I’m gay,” Richie says, fast like he’s ripping off a band-aid. “Big old flaming homo.”

Eddie flinches. He can’t help it. It’s the slur that hits him more than anything, the rest of it… it settles something in Eddie, like a small piece of him is saying _wait, it’s okay?_ He doesn’t want to look at it too hard, but it’s distracting enough that Richie stumbles forward without his input.

“I promised myself that I would say it if I ever saw you guys again. Because if I didn’t the clown was gonna break it to you in the most traumatic way possible.” Richie shoves his hand in his pocket, his shoulders rounded, his eyes on his feet. “I guess IT already fucked that up.”

Richie keeps walking even though Eddie has stopped.

It takes Eddie a second to force past his shock and realize just how big this must be for his friend. To admit to something like that in Derry in the 80s, it was a huge act of trust. Say that to the wrong person and it was a death sentence. In 2016, it probably still is.

But he and Richie, they don’t do the big emotional conversations, never have. When Eddie tries to push something profound to the forefront, all he manages to say is, “But what about my mom?”

Eddie can see Richie trembling as he turns around, but he’s schooled his face blank. “Eds, babe, I lied. I’ve been fucking your dad the whole time.”

“Also extremely dead,” Eddie says. “You gigantic bag of dicks.”

“A bag of dicks sounds wonderful,” Richie replies and then lets out a soft oof as Eddie pulls him into a hug.

“I hate you so much,” Eddie mumbles into his shoulder. It’s terrible that even wearing a video game avatar that he’s the short one. “For so many legitimate reasons. You really think being gay ranks?”

“I’ve heard your two hour treatise on AIDS and infection rates, Eds. Forgive me some paranoia. I thought you’d run screaming in the opposite direction.”

“Fuck.” Eddie pulls back just far enough to look Richie in the eyes. “You really think you’re getting rid of me again?”

Richie raises a hand and cups it to Eddie’s cheek, looking at Eddie like he’s about to disappear. Like he’s about to…

“Looks like the faggots came out to play.” The person approaching them, flanked by a half dozen faceless cronies is a dead ringer for Henry Bowers, age seventeen. Right down to the sneer and the mullet.

Richie drops his hand from Eddie’s face and turns around. Eddie follows. His stomach ties itself in knots. He wants to tell Richie about the pride parades marching through New York. About the Supreme Court’s ruling guaranteeing marriage equality just last year.

Richie’s hasn’t seen any of it. Might never see it if Eddie doesn’t get him out of here.

“You hear me, faggots?”

“I’m married,” Eddie corrects mildly.

Richie stares at Eddie rather than the gang of larger boys. Eddie has been on the wrong end of more than one beating in his day. He’s not looking forward to doing it in a game. Injuries might be relatively easy to take care of, but he’s well aware of how much the stuff in game can _hurt…_

“Faggots can’t get married.” Bowers cracks his knuckles.

“Do you guys not get the newspaper in this hellscape?” Eddie counters and if possible Richie’s eyes go wider.

Bowers doesn’t reply, but his eyes are hard and Eddie realizes that he must be like the rest of them. Part of the game. A shell without a real soul. Not that Bowers had much of a soul to start with. Either way, the stance is unnerving and he finds himself grabbing for Richie’s shoulder. “Rich, should we run?”

Richie shakes himself out of his spell, his jaw setting in a way that makes him look exactly like Bev.

“Fuck no.” He widens his stance. “This is a fighting level.”

Eddie doesn’t have much more warning before Richie throws himself into the middle of the gang. It’s clear that he doesn’t know how to fight. His punches are weak, his movements gangly. He looks every inch like a kid who got beat up on a weekly basis in high school.

It is equally clear that he has been in a fight before. Specifically, that Richie has been in _this_ fight before. His movements, though gawky, are borderline prescient. He ducks punches, slips neatly out of what should be a hold. He throws effective elbows that breaks noses. He even manages to gain control of Bowers’s baseball bat, swinging as hard as he can at one of the cronies. It connects so solidly with his head that Eddie can hear the skull fracture. The body collapses to the ground and then explodes into what looks like a sudden splash of blood. Eddie feels his stomach turn over as Richie calm jabs backwards with the butt of the bat and catches another goon in the chin. While he’s reeling, Richie takes the opportunity to smash the next skull, the head nearly exploding on contact spraying Richie with blood.

How many times do you have to do a fight to be this coordinated? To have memorized every feint and figured out how to break every hold?

How many times before you stop having a physical reaction to the gore of it?

Richie flips the bat over in his hand as Bowers and the rest of the troop flee across the kissing bridge and out towards the barrens. Richie watches them go, wipes the blood off the side of his cheek and then turns back to look at Eddie. “You’re married?”

Wiping the blood with his hand hasn’t done much more but smear it around his face. His hair is askew, his eyes guarded.

“Yeah.” Eddie doesn’t want to have this conversation. “But not for too much longer, I think.”

He doesn’t know how he could go back to Myra after something like this. She’d already been pissed at him for leaving. He’s not Stan. He doesn’t tell his wife his every inner thought. More than that he hasn’t really felt like Eddie since he made it back to Derry and Myra doesn’t know that Eddie. The one who has friends. The one who is _healthy._ The one who has been trying to outrun his childhood and can now see that he wound up right back in its jaws.

Richie’s still staring at him, his expression wiped clean. “You found Bev, didn’t you?”

Eddie frowns at the change in subject. “What are you talking about?”

“IT told me” Richie puts one end of the bat on the ground. “IT said it would take both of us. But you’d only look for her.”

“Fuck, Rich, that’s not what happened.”

Only… It was, wasn’t it? None of the Losers were talking to each other. Eddie was on lockdown in his house following his broken arm. Bill contacted him about Bev and they’d all come together. The five of them. When they couldn’t find Richie, they’d assumed that he’d either ditched them. There’d been no message to suggest otherwise.

It wasn’t until they hit the sewers that Eddie had the creeping realization that Pennywise might have Richie, too.

“So what, you found her and just _forgot_ about me?” He affects a voice. To Eddie’s horror, it’s _Bill’s_. _“_ Who gives a shit about T-t-t-trashmouth. He’s just the annoying q-q-queer tagging alo—“

“Beep fucking beep, Richie,” Eddie shouts. “That’s the fucking clown talking. I love you. We all love you.”

“But you grew up and you got _married_ and you fucking left me in here.” Richie runs a hand through his hair, suddenly frantic. “I used to think it was this place, you know. That time moved faster here because the clown was fucking with me. But you got married and I’m just—”

He gestures to his avatar. The one he freely admitted that he picked because it looked like Bev. Bev, who the Losers saved in the sewers while Richie got left behind.

The Losers had looked after the Neibolt house, but by then they’d all _known_ Richie was gone. Eddie had been to that arcade more than once in the years that followed. The game had disappeared the same time the clown had hits its hibernation. Even if he had noticed and made the connection, there was nothing Eddie could have done.

“You left me here, Eds,” Richie finishes. “You… you fucking left me.”

He turns to walk away, over kissing bridge that would lead him out of town, towards the Barrens and sewer access.

Eddie calls, “It’s my fault we didn’t kill Pennywise the first time.”

Richie stops moving, but he doesn’t turn around.

Eddie blinks hard and strides two steps forward, grabbing Richie by the shoulder and spinning him so he can look him in the eyes. “We had IT on the ropes. And I think we could have done it. But then IT looked and me and told me I’d never see you again if IT died.”

Richie holds his gaze.

“That was it. I choked. Fucking monster demon clown was always good about finding weak spots. And that was mine. My biggest fear in the world.” Eddie feels his voice crack. God, that hasn’t happened since he was a teenager. “That I’d never get to see you again.”

He’d felt guilty ever since. Richie had been the last disappearance of the summer, but the ones that happened this year? Those were on him.

The worst part is, he doesn’t regret it.

“That was your biggest fear?” Richie’s voice wavers. There looks like there might be tears in his eyes, but he swallows him back and puts the two of them back on familiar ground. “Eds, babe, that is super embarrassing for you.”

Eddie sputters out a laugh. Richie beams, like he always does when he manages to make Eddie crack.

“It’s not my fault,” Eddie says even though he doesn’t quite believe it. “Mike says this town fucks with your head. As soon as you leave, you forget. I didn’t even remember Bill and Stan until I saw them again. But when I remembered, I looked for you. Even though we were sure we weren’t gonna find you, I looked right up until Mom moved us out of Derry.” He deflates. “And then I didn’t even remember what I was missing.”

Except, deep down, he’s always known that something was missing. He’d let himself get riled up, slinging insults only to find that they weren’t returned. Little by little, that part of him, the one that was always secretly yearning for a _fight_ realized he wasn’t getting one. And Eddie had changed. Fuck, he’d grown up _timid_. Like his Mom always wanted him.

“That…” Richie says after a long pause. “That is a whole lot of clown bullshit.”

“Yeah.” Eddie swipes at his eyes. His hands hit glasses first and he has to take them off to swab the moisture out. “I’m gonna kill him for real this time.”

“That’s my Eds.” Richie spins the bat on the pavement. “But you gotta forgive me for being a little behind. You’re _married_ , apparently me and your Dad can finally tie the knot—your Mom will be crushed—you moved out of Derry and for some unfathomable reason you decided to _come back_.”

“You can’t marry my dad, dude. Gay marriage is legal. Necrophilia is still kind of a big no.”

Richie gives him a lopsided smile. “How old are you, Eddie?”

All the smiles and jokes flush out of Eddie. It’s the question he has been avoiding since he got here. And he doesn’t think he’s the only one.

But he’s never lied to Richie before. Not about anything that actually mattered.

“Forty,” Eddie whispers.

“Fuck,” Richie answers. “Fuck, dude. That’s like. Adult central. Over the hill. I bet you pay taxes.”

“I have a robust stock portfolio,” Eddie says.

“And I was planning to invest my entire fortune in comic books. All seventeen dollars of it. Fuck, my sister probably ran away with my comics. Goddammit. Eds, what would I even look like at forty? How the fuck do adults even _work_?”

It’s safer to get his hackles up than reach for sympathy. So that’s what Eddie does. “You’d look like you, you dipshit. I still look like me. Just older. Don’t you miss actually looking like you?”

“Aw,” Richie coos. “You miss my handsome mug.”

“That’s not—“ Eddie slaps an exasperated hand to his face. “Wait, a second. How old are _you_?”

“Thirteen,” Richie answers instantly and innocently.

But even years out of practice, Eddie can still read Richie better than just about anyone else in the world. “And how long have you been thirteen?”

“I stopped counting after a while.” Richie lets out a soft huff of air, shaking his head like he’s just been outplayed. “More than ten years, definitely. Less than fifty. Best guess is same as you.”


	6. Chapter 6

Eddie can’t quite conceptualize it. Twenty-seven years in the same place. Trapped inside a game. Memorizing every inch of the place and unable to escape. No wonder Richie doesn’t think it’s possible to beat the game. If he’d had this much time and didn’t find a way out, why should that change now that Eddie’s here?

Unless it’s tied to Pennywise.

Shit, wasn’t that the thing from Ben’s crazy research wall all those years ago? IT only comes out once every twenty seven years and the time in between… IT’s just asleep, waiting.

God Eddie doesn’t even want to consider that the game could be a product of IT’s nightmares.

He chances a look sideways at Richie, but he’s marching resolutely forward. They’re almost to what would be the old kissing bridge on the outskirts of town. Eddie almost says something more than once, but he can’t quite find the way to put it into words.

It’s Richie who finally breaks the silence. His voice cracking like only a prepubescent’s can. “So... I can really get married in the future?”

Eddie has to mentally shake himself as he remembers the first part of the conversation. Because by comparison to everything else, the fact that Richie liked guys didn’t really register. “You could always get married,” he says, his mind on Myra. “But yeah, you and me could, like, get married if we wanted to.”

For some reason this makes Richie turn bright red, like he’d been dunked in freezing cold water. He sputters for a second but then says, “And everyone’s just okay with this?”

Eddie shrugs. “Not people who are dicks, but yeah? In New York people barely blink at it anymore. The Losers, definitely. Honestly, Rich, the only thing real thing that’s going to narrow your dating pool is if this fucking game spits you back out and thirteen.”

“But I am thirteen,” Richie says. The baseball bat drags on the ground behind him. “You get that right? I may have done this year a lot. Like a really ridiculously obnoxious amount of time, but that doesn’t make me an actual adult. My brain is still making all those teenage chemicals. I didn’t get to grow up. My voice still cracks. I never went to prom. I never had a job. I just had… this. Over and over again”

“Fuck,” Eddie says. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

“God, I hope I don’t look forty when we make it. I’ll probably look like my dad.”

Dr. Tozier was… Eddie struggles to picture him from when they were kids. He was tall, with a forehead that was higher than normal, but not enough that kid Eddie had pegged it as a receding hairline. He’d had a wide smile and very straight teeth. “You could do worse,” Eddie hedges.

Richie clutches his chest, putting on his Southern Belle voice. “Eds, that’s my own father you’re talking about.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie snaps. “Be serious for once in your life.”

“Serious?” Richie looks to Eddie, his eyes wild. “What the fuck am I supposed to do if I get out of here? If I’m an adult, I can’t get a job. I didn’t finish school. I don’t know taxes or any of that other shit. And if I’m still a kid… My friends are the same age as my parents. My parents are _dead_ for all I know. There’s no winning for me. So what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

“Not stay here, dipshit,” Eddie puts a hand on Richie’s shoulder. The contact seems to ground him. “We’ve got a fucking clown to kill.”

“Right,” Richie agrees. “Because that makes me much less stressed about the rest of it.”

Funnily, that’s actually true for Eddie. Even growing up, he was the type who panicked about just about everything. And at some point, he’d lost sense of scale. Fear about an ebola outbreak a continent away and the creeping anxiety that his boss was monitoring his e-mails, they were basically the same. God forbid his brain make any distinction between the infinitesimal chances of dying in an airplane crash and being eaten by a clown. “Richie,” he says seriously. “We’ll figure it out. All seven of us. We won’t leave you alone.”

“Like you did last time?” Richie asks sharply and shrugs off the hand.

They’re at the kissing bridge now and the wood, usually scarred from thousands of love-sick teenagers is smooth except for a single piece that Eddie refuses to think deeply about. A neatly cut heart circumventing the letters _R+E_. Richie studiously ignores it as he passes. Eddie trails a finger over the carving, letting his fingers catch in the edges of the heart.

“That wasn’t on purpose,” Eddie says.

“Whatever,” Richie mumbles and keeps stalking forward.

Past the bridge it’s not far until they’re in the barrens and the sewer access. Unlike in the Derry Eddie remembers there’s a key lock over the entrance. Richie tugs the key out from under his shirt. The anger seems to have mostly seeped out of him. “You sure you want to do this?”

“Of course I don’t want to do this,” Eddie snaps. “But I think we need to.”

Richie nods. “Okay. I know you picked up a map at your house, but after the first few hours, it’s pretty shit. The tunnels have a tendency to move. I’ve been in there enough that I can usually predict how, but something about this whole thing feels different this time.”

At that, a shiver runs down Eddie’s spine at that. The Losers are here, no doubt looking for a way to get them out, but Pennywise is also awake.

“Eds,” Richie prods.

“I’m scared,” Eddie admits. “How the fuck have you been doing this for more than twenty years?”

“I had thoughts of your mom to keep me going.”

Eddie slugs him hard in the shoulder, but instead of pulling his arm back, he leaves it there, lets it turn into a solid grip on Richie’s shirt. “You’re really gonna make that joke? Right before certain death?”

“Right.” Richie pauses a beat, licks his lips. “That it isn’t fair to your dad.”

Eddie cracks up. He can’t help it. As he does, some of the tension leaves Riche’s frame and he beams over at Eddie. It only makes Eddie laugh harder, a fist still clenching a bunched up handful of Richie’s shirts. The game shakes around them, an odd distortion to the scenery, almost like the edges of his vision have gone pixelated.

“We won’t die, Eddie,” Richie says. “I gotta go get gay-married after this. You’ll be my best man for sure.”

Something in Eddie shifts at the words, at Richie’s tentative little smile. He thinks of the boys in the mirror who had looked like Richie, and the way he’d devoured the other. He thinks about the way Richie braced himself his announcement, the way coming out to Eddie had been the last resort before Pennywise went ahead and outed him.

He thinks of his fingers catching on the initials in the bridge. The easy way he’d said the phrase _you and me could get married. If we wanted to_.

Fuck. He can’t do this. Can’t think of the what-ifs. Because if Richie hadn’t disappeared, Eddie would be a completely different person. He can feel the pieces trying to slot back together, but they don’t fit the shape he occupies now. “Of course, Rich,” he says. “Anything you need.”

If Richie’s still a kid after this, Eddie will figure out some way to keep him. If he’s an adult, he’ll make sure he can adjust. And the rest of it… Eddie has a sinking feeling in his gut that he’s missed a chance for something different.

He shoves the feeling down. It doesn’t matter. He’ll deal with the rest of his bullshit if they survive. The only goal right now is the actual survival part.

Richie turns the key in the lock and together, they pull open the heavy metal door and walk into the sewers. The passage way is narrow, they two of them bumping shoulders as they make their way farther down the tunnel. Eddie pulls a flashlight from his bag, but doesn’t switch it on yet.

“Door’s gonna shut behind us,” Richie says. “Three, two, one.”

On cue, the metal door groans as it slowly swings shut. Eddie still jumps at the sound and his hand finds Richie’s. Richie squeezes it lightly, as if in reassurance as the darkness swaddles them.

“We’re okay,” Richie says. “Flashlight?”

Eddie flips it on just long enough to see a small figure at the edges of the tunnel. He’s wearing a yellow rain slicker, the hood drawn. One of the sleeves is oddly loose, flapping against itself like there’s no arm inside. Eddie is hit with a sudden memory. Bill in the sewers, as a thing that looked like Georgie peered up at him.

The Georgie thing in front of them bolts left.

Richie tugs them forward, his hand a solid comfort in Eddie’s own. As they move farther into the sewer system, following the flashes of yellow like they had in the forest, there is more and more water at their feet.

 _Gray water_ his brain whispers to him. _What happens if you trip, Eddie? What happens if you breathe too deeply_?

He forces himself to breathe just to spite the voice. The scent is so viscerally potent that it chokes him, but it’s not what he expects. It’s something different from the normal smell of shit and urine. It has a different bite to it, almost like there’s something burning.

His flashlight flickers and they stumble to a halt.

Eddie shakes the flashlight, hitting it against his hip in the hopes that the beam might stabilize but it fizzles out and the darkness reclaims them.

Eddie’s grip on Richie’s hand tightens. Richie himself has gone completely still.

In the darkness at the end of the tunnels, there is a pair of glowing yellow eyes.

“Fuck,” Eddie whispers. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”

“This is too early,” Richie says. He sounds faint. “Hey Dickywise! This is too fucking early!”

The clown cackles and the eyes start moving, the water sloshing with its approach. Eddie drops Richie’s hand so he can fumble in the backpack for a battery, his heartbeat thundering in his ears as he pries off the plastic cap and lets the old batteries splash into the knee-deep shitty water as he slides the other ones into place and frantically slides the switch back into the on position and spins the light outwards.

He hears a splash, but the water in front of him is undisturbed, the only ripples clearly from his own movement. There’s clearly not enough water in front of him to submerge an entire clown.

“Richie,” he mutters, reaching blindly to his side, trying to reacquire his anchor. “What just happened? Are we safe?”

His hand closes on empty air. He grasps again to the same effect, his heart doubling.

Because Richie is _gone._ It’s just like the last he was in the sewers, constantly looking over his shoulder to find an empty space. Except this time, Richie is supposed to be here. Richie isn’t missing anymore.

He spin in a circle frantically, the beam of his flashlight hitting every inch of the place, but there’s nowhere he could have gone and there’s no way Richie would pull some shit like this. Not after everything else.

“Richie!” He shouts and the word echoes back at him, distorting until it’s unintelligible. He hits the end of his turn and then he hears something change, a rushing sound, the kind of sound that you only ever hear next to moving, tumultuous water.

In front of him is a sudden swell, like the entire town decided to flush their toilets at the same time, he turns to run, but the water is too fast. It hits him hard enough to sweep him off his feet and he takes one last gasp of air as he surrenders to the current.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Chapter count is tentatively in the 9-10 range. We are edging towards the end)


	7. Chapter 7

Eddie must pass out because when he wakes up, white pulses on the edges of his vision. His flashlight is gone. Swept away.

But it’s not dark, not entirely.

He pushes his wet bangs out of his face. His glasses are cracked, but he can still breathe. The inhaler is still in his pocket, the best weapon he can have. The backpack is still firmly looped through his arms. He has no idea where he is, but the map was supposed to become useless rather than help.

Eddie spits out, trying to get the last of shitty water out of mouth. He’s in a game. This isn’t real. He’s not going to get cholera from the water. He’s going to find Richie and they’ll finish the fucking game and then they’ll kill the fucking clown and Eddie will go back to his shit show of a life and try to force it into something that doesn’t feel like a cage.

He turns slowly on the spot, his hands shaking.

There is a figure at the end of the hallway by the light.

Eddie reaches under the cracked glasses to rub his eyes, but that same white light seems to overpower everything. “Hello?”

The figure turns slowly. There’s blood trickling from a nostril, but it’s running up rather than down. The eyes are wide open, but there’s nothing but white behind them. Eddie takes an involuntary step backwards, tripping and hits the wet ground, soaking his shorts thoroughly. “Richie?” he asks, hating the tremor in his voice.

“Eddie?” Richie says, only it’s definitely not Richie’s voice.

Eddie pulls himself up and steps closer, his head tilted in curiosity. “Bev?”

Her gaze is gentle and unfocused but when she talks, it’s clear that the message is meant for him. “Eddie? I don’t know if you can hear me, but we haven’t figured it out yet. And the clown… the clown is not making it easy.”

There’s a buzzing around her words. A static distortion, but she’s definitely here and she’s definitely talking to _him_.

“Between me and Stan, we’re pretty sure it has something to do with the deadlights.”

Eddie watches as a droplet of blood detaches from the body of Richie’s avatar and floats up to the top of the sewers. “Bev, what are you doing to Richie?”

“See, I don’t think they’re good or bad, Eddie,” Bev continues as if she hadn’t heard him. “They’re just a tool. And that means they’re something you can use.” There’s a long pause and she hisses, “Shut up, Bill we might only get one shot at this.” Then she refocuses and says, “The Losers—“

The buzzing in Eddie’s ears intensifies, drowning out the rest of the speech. Eddie slaps a hand over his ears, his throat raw like he’s been screaming and then the light builds into something so bright that Eddie can’t see and—

His vision clears and he finds himself face down in shitty water. He spits it out as he pushes himself up to a sitting position, trying to exorcise the taste. He hears a splash somewhere to his left and reaches through the sudden darkness until his hand hits flesh.

Richie says, “What the actual fuck just happened?”

Eddie could cry with relief. Richie’s still here. He hasn’t lost him. The Losers are still out there somewhere. Looking for Eddie.

Maybe even looking for them both.

“I think I just talked to Bev,” Eddie says. He feel around in the water and, thankfully, comes up with a flashlight. He points it towards the water before flicking it on, but even then the light momentarily dazzles him.

It’s definitely Richie in front of him. He carries himself completely different that Bev had even though it’s the same shell. Richie has none of Bev’s careful confidence, his shoulder rounded, his eyes constantly scanning the surrounds like a wrong move will get him killed. He touches the bridge of his nose, a pointless gesture to adjust glasses he hasn’t worn in _years_.

“You talked to _Bev_ , did you?” Richie draws out the name, almost mockingly.

“Jesus, Rich, it’s Bev. You like Bev.”

“I barely know Bev,” Richie says.

Eddie starts to retort, but then he realizes he’s right. They’d all been at the same school for a few years, but they weren’t actually friends. Not until that summer. When Richie had gone missing, he would have only been friends with Bev for a couple of weeks at best.

Same with Mike.

Same with Ben.

“She’s a Loser,” Eddie says slowly. “And she’s looking for us.”

“Maybe for _you_.”

“Only because she probably thinks you’re _dead_. You get that right? We may have looked for you the rest of that summer, we may have kept looking for you after. But we all thought you were _dead_.”

Richie opens and closes his mouth a few times, but doesn’t find a comeback.

Eddie swallows his simmering anger. “She said something about the deadlights.”

“Stay the fuck away from the deadlights,” Richie snaps. “I’ve been here longer, Bev doesn’t know shit.”

“You weren’t there, but her and Stan, in the Neibolt house. They both looked at the lights. Bev said they showed her things.” Eddie skitters over the fact that it showed her how all of them were going to _die_ if they decided to flake out on fighting the clown. “But she also said it’s not good or bad, it’s just a tool.”

“Then it’s a tool that Pennywise pretty fucking good with,” Richie snaps. “You know what happens when I’ve looked at the deadlights? I’ve died. Game over, start again from step one. It’s literally in the name.”

Eddie frowns. “But you said starting over was a choice.”

“It’s not a choice! It’s start over or _stop all together_. And my life has been shit for a while, but guess what? I still don’t want to die.”

“Richie…”

“We’re not talking about this right now. For all we know that was the _clown_.”

Eddie doesn’t think so. For all the bizarre things he’s seen the clown do, it’s never infested one of their own to a degree like that. At least not if they were still living. He remembers it using Georgie’s form the first time, and Betty’s, but while it could have done more damage looking like any one of the Losers, that seems like it’s against the _rules_. Even the faceless boys they’d sighted in the window, would have made more sense.

And Henry Bowers…

Well, Eddie has a distinct memory of him plummeting down a well. A fall that no one actually survives.

So those are the two options before him. Either Richie is willfully ignoring advice that probably came from Bev. Or Richie died twenty-seven years ago and then thing before him is his last corrupted echo.

“Eds?” Richie asks.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” Eddie snaps, and then he has to backtrack. Because it’s _Richie_ , he knows it’s Richie. And Richie, for all his protests as a kid, was the only one who was ever allowed to call him that.

 _(My sweet Eds, Myra had whispered to him, just once, and Eddie had jolted out of bed so suddenly that Myra thought he’d had a seizure._ )

“Sorry,” Eddie says quickly before Richie can recover. “I just hate these sewers.”

“It’s all right, Edward F. Kaspbrak, my good fellow,” Richie blusters. “Everyone hates the sewers.”

The hurt lingers behind his eyes. Eddie has no idea how to address it. He’s been talking to Richie like he used to when they were kids, but at every turn there’s a new minefield and he’s not sure what’s safe. Not sure if it’s practical to try and push forward. Not sure if he’s qualified to take on this kind of trauma, especially when he’s only starting to unravel his own.

Before he can say anything, they both hear a cackle in the distance. They turn in tandem, to look towards sound. Eddie’s first step is towards the noise, Richie’s away.

“We can’t fight yet,” Richie says. “That’s not how the game works. It’s all out of order.”

“But that’s a good thing, right?” Eddie counters. “If things are changing, that means you might have a chance to actually win this time. Otherwise, it’s just… rats on a treadmill, right? We want out. We change the game.”

“You said _Bev_ was working on it from the outside,” Richie protests. “We should be trying to stay _alive_.”

“How did that work out for you last time?” Eddie ask.

Richie flinches like he’s been slapped, but Eddie won’t let it bother him, barreling straight on ahead with more confidence than he has rightfully earned. “IT’s awake for the first time in years. Maybe the game’s changing because of that. Maybe it’s because you’re not alone anymore. Either way it doesn’t matter. We still need to fight this thing.”

“God you’re cute,” Richie mutters to himself.

“Fuck you, I’m like forty. This isn’t even my body.”

“Still cute,” Richie says, meeting his eyes defiantly. “And I want it to be known that this is the only reason I’m going to listen to you. Because honestly? I think this is going to get us both killed.”

But Richie has died in game before. Multiple times from what Eddie can infer. And it hadn’t mattered. None of it has done anything worse than scar Richie’s psyche. Eddie gives himself an irritated pinch, digging nails into the thin skin on the back of his hand. He shoves the thoughts aside and grabs Richie by the hand. “Listen, dipshit. I will not spend the rest of my life in a game and I will not leave you here. Which means we only have one choice.”

“Sure,” Richie agrees. He’s looking at their joined hands. “Lead the way.”

Eddie tugs them forward, towards the distant sound of the clown’s laughter. His skin crawls, ceding to goosebumps. There’s a resolve settling over him, something he didn’t think he was capable of. It’s a feeling he doesn’t trust, but one he wants desperately to believe in.

At the end of the tunnel it branches into three paths. To the left a door marked _Not Scary._ Dead ahead a door marked _Scary._ To his right, one marked _Very Scary._

Richie’s hand tightens in his own. “Eddie, we should go back.”

“No return, right Rich?” Eddie counters. “We go with, _Not Scary_ , right?”

“They’re all bad,” Richie says. “I’ve tried all of them and they’re all very fucking scary.”

Eddie hands his flashlight to Richie so he can keep the light going. At some point in the flooded corridor, Richie must have lost the baseball bat, but Eddie can still feel his inhaler, red and waiting in his pocket. He turns left and looks at the door that says _Not Scary_.

Then he pushes it open to the scene of his childhood bedroom. Unlike the one where he’d woken up in the game, this is definitely his. Right down to the neatly organized set of Shazam! Comics on his bookshelf. His fanny pack is lying on the nightstand.

“Eds,” Richie says urgently. “Eds, I don’t think this one is for me.”

 _Eddie bear!_ A phantom voice shouts and Eddie can’t tell if it’s Mom or Myra but he hears the slightly manic tone of the clown lurking behind the voice. _I’ll take care of you._

“Mommy?” Eddie whispers.

He reaches through the door and his hand starts to… fester. Blisters rupture on the skin of his forearm and dark lines trace his veins, a sure sign of infection. He finds himself moving inside anyway, the tips of his fingers starting to decay, his very flesh rotting and gangrenous.

Eddie’s seen this before. The Leper that had chased him as a child, it’s been here the _whole time_ festering unseen beneath his skin and--

A firm hand grabs Eddie by the back of the shirt and yanks him back, shutting the door behind him.

Eddie thrashes. “Don’t touch me. Holy shit. Don’t touch me. You’ll get it, too. I’m infectious.”

“Eddie!” Richie shouts. “It’s not _real_!”

“How the fuck do you know? What kind of fucked up mechanics even go into making something like that. Richie, you’ve got to—”

Richie puts a hand on either side of his face and kisses him. Eddie’s so shocked that he freezes. Even his brain in its jibbering senseless panic goes numb. Richie pulls back after a brief second, his cheeks scarlet.

“There,” he says, “now I’ve got whatever shit’s in your head, too. Come on, we don’t have time for this.”

Eddie is caught between a thousand protests, but as his brain blinks online all he can find a voice to say is, “You’re thirteen.”

“I’m also exactly the same age as you,” Richie retorts and throws open the door that reads _Very Scary_.

It’s clear that while _Not Scary_ had been met for Eddie, _Very Scary_ belongs to Richie. He steps into the room that doesn’t look like anything and then spins on the spot. “Eddie?” he asks, his voice pitched high in panic. “Eddie where did you go?”

“I’m right here, Rich,” Eddie replies, but it falls on deaf ears.

“Fuck,” Richie hisses. “You left me again. I knew you’d leave me again. Eddie! Goddammit. Bill? Stan? Eddie!?”

Eddie’s gut twists.

That’s Richie’s fear. Being alone. Being abandoned. Being unheard. In the game is bad enough, but Eddie can see all the ways the game must have _saved_ him. The interactions, however small and inconsequential that at least remind him that he was human, that he still existed. Eddie can’t imagine how much worse it could have been with complete isolation.

“Eddie!” Richie screams again, spinning wildly. “Where’d the door go? Eddie! Did you shut the door?”

Eddie grabs the door frame, reaching out as far as he can. Richie shudders with his hand connects with his elbow and is almost completely boneless when Eddie grabs him and yanks, hauling him back behind the door the same way he’d saved Eddie almost minutes before.

As the door shuts, Richie collapses to his knees, dry heaving into the half-inch of water on the ground. Eddie thinks briefly that he should pretend not to notice, but then considers the vast emptiness behind the _very scary_ door and says, “I won’t leave you behind again. I promise.”

Richie wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, standing shakily to look at the tunnel behind them. There’s a slowly growing white light that makes him grow even paler to look at. He turns instead to face the junction, looking at the only remaining door.

“Sorry about that,” Richie says, aiming for flippant and missing by a mile. “I should have remembered, you always pick regular scary.”

But Eddie is still staring at the white lights, the same ones he’d seen after the monster had attempted to poison him. The one he’d seen after the suddenly flood had washed them away. The ones that had echoed in the eyes of Richie’s avatar as Bev tried to give him a message.

“The deadlights,” Eddie whispers.

“Yeah, the clue’s in the name, Eds. That’s not a good idea. Come on, we can do regular scary. I’ve done regular scary before.”

Eddie grabs Richie’s hand again. “You trust me, right?”

“Of course. I just don’t really trust information coming from _Bev_.”

“Stan was with her,” Eddie counters. “So was Bill. I don’t think the lights are what we think. I think we can use them.”

“Eddie…”

“This is going to work,” Eddie says. He believes it with a conviction that he hasn’t felt in almost twenty-seven years. “We’re getting out of here, Richie. Both of us. Right now.”

Richie stares out at the deadlights, fear growing in his eyes, but he gives Eddie a nod. It’s small, almost imperceptible in the dim light, but it’s all Eddie needs.

“Right,” Eddie says. “Don’t let go of me. We do this together.”

And then, tugging Richie along with him, he drags them forward and into the deadlights.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was gonna wait an extra couple days to post this, but screw it, I just wrote the ending and I'm excited to see this through.

The white overpowers him, a ringing that he feels in his bones. The only thing saving him, keeping him real is his grip on Richie’s hand.

 _What do you mean do this without them_? Stan asks. _We barely made it out the first time_.

 _We can’t let Bill just rush in and die alone,_ Bev protests.

Eddie tries to open his mouth, tries to ask Richie if he can hear them too. Their friends. The ones who had touched the deadlights the first time. But he can’t speak. He’s not sure he even has a mouth anymore.

He knows he has a hand though. He has at least one hand and it’s clutching Richie’s.

The staticky buzz of the lights grows louder. Underneath them, Eddie thinks he can hear the clown’s giddy laughter. His mother’s persistent voice, the leper.

Not real, he reminds himself. He’s not sick. He’s got Richie back. They’re going to kill a clown.

The deadlights pulse on the edges of his vision and in the light, he hears a question: _Continue?_

Fuck that, Eddie thinks.

 _Play again?_ the lights ask.

Richie’s hand tightens in Eddie's own.

No, Eddie replies, firm and resolute in his own way. No more games

 _But you can’t leave_ , the clown’s voice bubbles past his ears. _You haven’t won the game._

Eddie forces himself to have a voice, to have a _body_ , to shout, “What makes you think I’m playing?!”

The lights shutter around him. He thinks Richie is screaming. Thinks he hears a chorus of his friends’ voices chanting _turn light into dark._

And then he’s face down in the sewers again.

Bev shouts, “Eddie!”

Eddie rolls over. He’s himself again. Forty years old, fit but well worn, with worry lines etched into his face and an anxious flutter in his heart.

Bill reaches down and hauls him to his feet before enveloping Eddie in a hug. Eddie’s taller than him now, by almost two full inches, but Bill still feels like the biggest presence in the room.

Mike says, “Guys, who’s that?”

There’s a man still sitting in the pooled water at the bottom of the sewer. He’s pale and rangy, long thin arms and a receding hairline. He stares at his own hands from behind a pair of cracked glasses as if hypnotized

Bill steps in front of Eddie, in front of them all, like he can provide some measure of protection for the rest of them.

“Is that Pennywise?” Ben asks. “I mean this was supposed to summon _Pennywise_.”

“What kind of a dumbass would summon Pennywise?” the man says, his focus turning to the Losers. “You guys know he eats people, right?”

“W-w-why do you know Pennywise?” Bill asks.

The stutter makes the man’s eyes narrow. “Bill? Is that you?” His eyes seek out Eddie’s next and hold his gaze. “Eds?”

“Okay, why does he know our names?” Mike says, taking a step back.

“Fuck, you guys are old.” The man takes his glasses off, squints at them for a second and then replaces them like that would clear his vision. Judging by his frown, it doesn’t work. “Wait, a second, does that mean I’m old?”

“Richie?” Stan asks and with the exception of Eddie, the rest of the Losers gape in shock.

“Guilty,” Richie says, tilting his head to the side. “Stan the Man. You still look like a constipated old fart.”

“Didn’t miss you at all, Trashmouth.” Stan bends down and offers Richie a hand, pulling Richie to straight into an embrace.

After a brief moment shock, the rest of the Losers pile on around them, putting Richie at the center of a many-armed hug. Eddie finds himself smiling at the group, letting himself be pulled in. He’s the only one who doesn’t let go of Richie when they finally disperse.

“See,” Eddie jokes. “Told you I’d pick up a token.”

As he says it, he’s suddenly aware of the press of his inhaler in his pocket. He doesn’t pull it out to check. Doesn’t know for sure if it’s the one from the game or the one from the pharmacy.

“Token?” a new voice says.

Eddie’s stomach curdles at it. The tone, the manic edge of laughter laced through every word.

“There were never any _tokens_ ,” Pennywise cackles. “What you brought was a _sacrifice_.”

Mike and Bill both wince at the phrasing. Eddie wraps a hand over Richie’s shoulder, but while he might have expected fear, Richie is impossibly steady. Eddie’s shaking enough for the both of them.

Pennywise’s voice dips lower. “I’ve waited twenty-seven long years to enjoy you, Trashmouth.”

There’s a shudder and the clown’s body hitches, shoulders lurching forward in growth followed by legs and a torso with and body hitching. It looks like tumors spontaneously growing, twisting the skin as the clown amasses height.

“Oh,” Mike says, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Should have thought this through, huh, _Mikey_ ,” the clown spits. “I’ll save you for last.”

The clear implication being that he intends to deal with Richie _first_.

Pennywise opens his mouth, displaying rows of yellowed teeth all of which seem filed to a point and drip with some horrific mixture of blood and saliva.

“Did no one ever teach you about flossing?” Richie shouts.

And oh, that’s right. Richie’s Dad was a dentist. Richie’s Dad used to instruct Eddie on the correct ways to floss whenever Mom conceded a night at a friend’s house.

Behind him the Losers are starting to make their escape, Stan tugging urgently on Eddie’s sleeve. In front of him, this bizarre adult version of Richie stares Pennywise down.

The clown, for his parts, continues to open its mouth, displaying more and more teeth.

“I’m afraid of a lot of things, but I’m out of the game,” Richie says. “You don’t fucking make the cut anymore.”

It seems to shudder at that, its growth suddenly stalled, the yellowing eyes a shade duller. And Richie, this strange, unfamiliar, adult Richie stands in front of IT.

A Richie who grew up alone in a game marinating in his own terror. A Richie that Eddie doesn’t know anymore.

“Oh, Trashmouth,” Pennywise coos. “You think you’ve won.”

And then one of its arms shoots out, elongating its reach past Richie and tosses Eddie into the side of the cavern. Eddie doesn’t see it coming, doesn’t even feel it until he hits a wall shoulder first and feels it slide out of his socket. He recognizes dimly, that he’s lucky. He didn’t hit his head. He didn’t break a leg. He can still get away.

Richie shouts, “Eddie! Eds!”

He ducks one of Pennywise’s blows, bolting across the cavern to skid to a stop at Eddie’s side.

The clown cackles. “Still feel, fear don’t we, Richie? Doesn’t matter that it’s not for you. You haven’t won. You _can’t_ win.”

“We got to get out of here!” Richie’s eyes are wide with panic. He places a hand on Eddie’s back and pushes him towards a crack in the cavern’s walls, bellow, “Go! Go!”

Eddie goes, managing the squeeze with more care than he probably has time for. He doesn’t miss the way that Richie positions himself, so that any blow from Pennywise would have to go through him before making it to Eddie.

Eddie _hates_ it. He hates all of this.

Stan’s already on the other side, his curly hair wild, his eyes blown wide. “Since when can IT do something like that? I thought it was just a clown.”

“It’s a fucking _bitch_ ,” Richie hisses, but his anger seems to lift when he sees Stan. “But you! I can’t believe you’re here. Fuck, I missed you guys.”

Eddie would grin at the sight of the two of them, but while adrenaline is keeping the bulk of his pain at bay, he’s really going to need to be able to use the arms. “Hey, weird questions, any of you up for setting a bone?”

Stan pales. “What the hell, Eddie?”

Richie steps forward. “I did it last time.”

Eddie has a sudden, vivid flashback to Richie crouching in front of him, gangly and all of thirteen years old, his hands braced on either side of his arm while Eddie yelled _don’t fucking touch me._ They’d had to rebreak it when he finally got to the hospital.

“Yeah, fuck that, I can do it myself.” Eddie’s pretty sure he’s got the basis for that. At very least, he knows where his shoulder’s supposed to go. He braces himself on the wall, takes a deep breath and pushes his dislocated shoulder against it.

He feels the difference as it rolls into place. He also feels the accompanying burst of pain.

He’d thought his fingers would be more cooperative after that. Or that it wouldn’t have increased the white spots on the edges of his vision.

“When did you become such a badass?” Richie asks.

“He’s literally pissing himself,” Stan snaps. “Just like the rest of us. We got you back, Richie. Which is great, but this is absolutely the time to cut and run. There’s no way this works out any better than it already has. We’re net one Loser! Let’s get the fuck out of the sewers.”

“No,” Eddie snaps, surprised by his own forcefulness. “I’m done running. IT’s only still here because we let IT go. _I_ let IT go. But we can win this time. I know we can.”

In the distance, there are screams. Eddie thinks it might be Bev. But Ben’s with her. And Mike’s got Bill. They watch out for each other.

“How?” Richie asks.

“You scared IT,” Eddie says. “You stood up to IT and IT _shrunk._ I did the same thing when I saw the leper in the basement. I stood up to IT. I wasn’t scared.”

“I’m pretty fucking scared,” Stan admits.

“Mind over matter dearest Staniel,” Richie cuts in. “I think Eds may be onto something. We’re still going to need some kind of weapon.”

Eddie reaches across his body with his good arm and fishes the inhaler out of his pocket. He turns it over in his hands, the red plastic actuator almost surreally unfamiliar in his hands.

“That’s not a weapon,” Stan deadpans. “We don’t need to give Pennywise a second wind.

Richie meets his eyes. Eddie nods and slowly, as if testing the words, he says, “It’s battery acid.”

Stan looks at him like he’s gone insane, but Eddie’s rolling through the rules back in the game. The deadlights that did what you wanted them to do, what you _expected_ them to do. The monster that wore his mother’s face locked in the house because Eddie believed he’d made it out.

“Fuck yeah it is,” Richie says.

And then Bev swans into their little chamber, dripping blood, clutching Ben’s hand on one side and what looks like a busted fence post on the other. “What are we talking about?”

“Killing monsters.”

“We basically brought Richie back from the dead.” She swipes some of the blood from her face, using it to slick her hair back. Next to her, Ben’s expression twists into something Eddie can only call adoration. “Seems like the logical next step.”

Not that Eddie blames Ben at all. Eddie’s always been a little in love with Bev in the same way he’d always been a little in love with Richie. Hell, with all of them.

He beams at her and the tunnel shakes.

This is hurting IT, too, Eddie realizes. Every smile, every laugh. The clown chokes on it.

As if their camaraderie summons them, Bill and Mike stumbled towards their little group. Bill wiping tears from his eyes, Mike standing tall and resolute.

It’s been a long time since the seven of them were all in one place.

And the seven of them?

Well, Eddie believes they can do just about anything.

“So what?” Stan drawls. “We let Eddie spray him with his inhaler and Pennywise just… goes away.”

“There’s always this.” Bev turns the fence post around in her hands and then hands it to Stan. “It kills monsters.” Off Stan’s look she adds, “If you believe it does.”

“You’ll make it back,” Ben promises. “Get to see Patty again.”

Richie peers through the crack in the cave wall, back into the cistern. He seems to be counting to himself before raising his voice to say, “I can do you guys a distraction.”

Mike frowns. “Richie, are you sure you want to do this I mean…”

“I’ve been in a game for twenty plus years? Yeah, man, I remember, but I’ve beat this fucking level before. Spider-clown. It’s literally just jump, duck and roll.”

“No,” Eddie protests. “I promised you I’d get you out.”

“You already did, Eds.” Richie smiles at him, toothy and genuine. It makes him look younger. Like the boy from Eddie’s memory. The one who’d been his best friend. The loss he’d never quite gotten over. It’s gone in an instant, his face settling into something more serious. “I’ll get you guys your shot.”

And he’s through the gap.

Eddie adjust the grip on his inhaler in his pocket.

Then he follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Last chapter at some point later this week.)


	9. Chapter 9

The thing is, Richie Tozier is not afraid. Not right now.

He’d been afraid in the game, in the vast empty room that swallowed every sound, but in the real world? In this old, unfamiliar body that creaked in all its joints? He knows he’s not alone.

His friends are here. Eddie. Stan. Bill. They recognize him. Even like this, they know who he is. And it isn’t just them. Even the Losers Richie doesn’t really know, the ones he’d never gotten the _chance_ to know recognized him. Ben and Mike and hell, even _Bev_.

They’d been thrilled to see him.

They didn’t forget. If not for the clown, they _never_ would have forgotten.

No one forgot him.

Richie tries to focus his scattered brain.

He’d told Eddie he was gay. He’d worked up enough courage to kiss him and Eddie’s protests had nothing to do with the kiss itself.

Here in this strange, future, Richie could get _married._ And Eddie’s exact words were _you and me could get married… if we wanted to_.

It didn’t seem like Eddie wanted to, but that was okay. Eddie didn’t think he was disgusting. His friends hugged him when he got back. He walked into the deadlights and things didn’t start over. Most of what Pennywise had been telling him for years was a _lie._

As soon as Eddie had pointed it out, Richie had _known_ he was right. Richie had seen it, too, though he’d never managed to put his observations into words. It was in the way he’d made the clown shrink. The way it seemed like, for just a second, that Richie could hurt IT. So long as he wasn’t afraid.

And for the first time since he can remember, Richie is very much unafraid.

He glances behind him to see Eddie has followed him into the cistern, his inhaler clutched in his fist. Richie tosses him a smile.

Eddie’s with him. All the Losers are with him.

He’s right where he’s supposed to be.

In the cistern, Pennywise howls. He’s contorted himself into a massive spider thing, skittering sideways. It’s waiting for them. Its maw gnashing, its yellow eyes shining in delight. Richie looks over his shoulder again. Stan and Bev have joined Eddie. Ben is in the process of squeezing his way through.

“Okay,” says Richie, “which one of you fuckers is afraid of spiders?”

Judging by the look on Stan’s face, he is still very much afraid of spiders, but it’s Bev who raises a sheepish hand.

Ben settles an arm over her shoulder. “We’re all bigger than a spider.”

“Not this one,” Stan mutters. His knuckles are white against the fence post.

“You know he’s got a point,” Richie says and then he steps out of his hiding place, hollering. “Hey, you fucking clown. You make a terrible spider!”

He’s done this level before. A spider-clown, its legs closer to knives as they jab out, looking to skewer him.

Richie’s been skewered before, knows the feeling of the puncture, knows it’s worse on the way back out. Blood loss wouldn’t be a bad way to go if not for the trauma that inevitably preceded it. The act itself is just light-headedness followed and a ringing in his ears, like his body screaming internally and the it’s _gone._

It had taken Richie a while to get the hang of the spider. But there’s a pattern to it, the pause, the hitch, the attack. He’s gotten to the point where he can do it without thinking, his legs moving automatically. It only takes a second to confirm the same pattern. The same mechanism.

Richie dodges the first spindly leg, smooth and confident despite the unfamiliar body.

 _His body_ , he reminds myself. _He’s an adult. All his friends are adults. Eddie promised they’d figure it out together._

“Carfeul!” Eddie shouts.

And Richie would be grateful, except he doesn’t much work as a distraction if Eddie’s drawing the clown’s attention.

So Richie does what he’s always done and pulls the attention back to him. Throws a rock, shouts insults and then ducks the next blow with an ease that comes from years of practice. His muscles scream at him, but he doesn’t care.

Stan throws the fence post. It hits the clown mid-torso. And with a howl it spins only to be greeted by Eddie, the inhaler pointed outwards as he pumps a few doses in its face. Pennywise lashes its arms out blindly, its yellow eyes bleeding and red. One of them catches Eddie in the torso.

Richie screams, “You pathetic fucking _clown_. You’re useless! You’re _small!_ ”

Ben screams, “Together, we’re _bigger than you_.”

Bev screams, “We _stomp_ on spiders!”

The clown’s body shudders and shrinks. And then there are more voices, Bill, Mike… Even Stan who still sounds shaky as he shouts, “You’re just a _painting_.”

Pennywise cowers, skittering backwards on its increasingly fragile legs. Richie tries not to think about how one of them is coated in blood. Most of the Losers are coated in blood, too. Bev and Ben especially.

As if sensing his anxiety, Pennywise’s yellowed eyes zero in on him.

“Think you’ve won, do you Richie?” IT cackles. “Think poor, queer Trashmouth gets a happy ending.”

Richie goes still for just a second. It’s habit. But then he remembers Eddie. Remembers he can get married. Remembers that it’s _okay_.

A hand settles on his shoulder, but when he looks, it’s not Eddie but Stan, who gives him a reassuring squeeze and a shaky smile.

Richie tries not to panic as the clown’s laughter grows. “Did you actually think you won the game?”

That’s when Richie’s eyes hit a small figure near the cavern’s wall.

“Eddie,” he shouts.

“Go,” Bev says. “We’ve got this.”

And Richie runs through the rubble of the cave to the place where Eddie lies, clutching at the hole in his side. Richie finds himself reaching automatically for the bandages, even though by this point in the game, he’s always out. He thinks bitterly of the way Eddie made him use one for on himself before the sewers.

Then he remembers this isn’t the game.

“Eds,” he whispers.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie slurs.

Blood loss. A sucking chest wound. Not the worst way Richie’s died. Not his favorite, either. “Fuck, dude. What do you have to be sorry about?”

He _knows_ Eddie feels guilty. Specifically, that Eddie feels guilty about _him_. That Richie’s reactions to things in the game hadn’t helped in the slightest.

Eddie doesn’t say any of that. His eyes have gone unfocused, his voice low. “Swore I’d get you out.”

“What do you mean, Eds?” There are tears building in Richie’s eyes. When he tries to swipe at them, his hands hit his glasses. He didn’t wear glasses in the game. “You did get me out.”

Eddie shakes his head, his chin falling towards the inhaler still clutched loosely in his bloodied hands.

He says, “That’s not my inhaler.”

Then his eyes go vacant.

Richie feels his hand tighten on Eddie’s forearm, but Eddie doesn’t reach back. He can’t hear breathing anymore. Eddie’s hands are still warm. Richie can’t tell if the slow ooze of blood down his shirt is fresh or just gravity doing its work.

Except, he can absolutely tell.

Eddie’s gone.

The numbness that Richie hadn’t quite realized was ebbing slams back into full focus. Behind him the clown is laughing. He’d thought…

He’d thought his friends were winning.

But there’s no victory if Eddie’s dead.

Richie lets his eyes slide off the wound on Eddie’s chest and to his inhaler. He pries it gently out of limp fingers and examines it. He used to carry a spare for Eddie back when they were kids. They’d all seen him run enough to realize that he probably didn’t need it, but Richie carried it anyway.

Eddie was right. The inhaler’s the wrong color.

Fuck. Was that worth his last words? For all Richie knows they changed distributers from when they were kids. It doesn’t mean _anything_.

Only…

Richie knows exactly what it means.

As he turns, the world melts away. The clown is still smaller than that massive spider, but Richie feels smaller, too Like the years are being stripped from his body.

“Almost pulled it off, eh Richie?” Pennywise chides.

“Was it real?” Richie asks.

“Did dear Eds kick the old bucket?” Pennywise bares its teeth. “ _Yes_.”

And the fear of trying to live in the real world without Eddie had overwhelmed him. Given the clown enough pull to steal him back into the game.

“I would have starved,” Richie realizes. “Twenty seven years… there’s no way I grew up.”

He looks down at his hands. He was the ghost out there.

But… No, that was wrong. He was _real_ out there. Because the other Losers _believed_ he was.

“They had you and they _still_ didn’t win,” Pennywise hisses. “So what do you say? Do we play again?”

The deadlights are creeping into the edges of his vision, eroding the sewers around them, obliterating all color except white.

Eddie believed the two of them into the real world. And Richie with his well-worn doubts didn’t quite trust it enough to sever his ties to the game.

He can see his mistake now.

He turns his back on the clown and lets the lights overwhelm him.

Eddie told him the deadlights were a _tool._

And it’s not like he has anything left to lose.

He can feel Pennywise pushing its way into the light behind him, but the clown draws power from fear and the Losers aren’t afraid of him.

 _Richie_ isn’t afraid of him.

Not anymore.

It doesn’t make the lights hurt any less, but even that feels different, feels earned. It’s been a long time since Richie felt _real_.

 _Play again?_ the lights whisper.

 _No,_ Richie responds, even as Pennywise claws for control. _No, I think you should put me back._

The response is a more of a question, a gentle press against his mind.

 _I’m alive if you go back,_ Pennywise screams. _I will_ eat _all of your friends._

 _Dare you to try,_ Richie snarls and wrenches control of the deadlights from the clown.

* * *

He dangles for a moment, too overwhelmed to move, the lights suffusing his every pore. He sees himself die in excruciating ways. A replay of every single one in the game and more. He sees how he could have grown up, successful, wealthy, but _alone_ in ways he doesn’t want to contemplate. He sees his friends die one after the other. He sees the clown _win_ , like it had so many hundreds of times before it encountered the Losers. He sees Eddie…

There’s a pressure building around him as his eyes clear their fog.

Eddie’s in front of him.

His Eddie.

Small, wide-eyed and all of thirteen, color rising in his cheeks as he whirls to shout, “Shut the fuck up. It worked with Bev!”

“That’s because they like each other,” Mike says, amused. “You can’t sleeping beauty someone awake if it’s not _one true love_.”

Richie can’t help it, he laughs.

It draws the others’ disbelieving gazes. Eddie, of course reacts quicker than the rest of them, slugging him hard in the shoulder as he screeches, “I leave you alone for one fucking second and you get _kidnapped_.”

Richie’s crying even before Eddie wraps him in crushing hug, his cast pressing heavily into his back. 

_I love you, too, you fucker_ , he thinks. He almost says it back. Because he can guess the actions that lead to the here and now.

He thinks Eddie must have kissed him.

There’s a future out there somewhere, where the two of them can get married. The details are flowing out of his mind the more he shakes off the deadlights in favor of the here and now. He’ll tell Eddie later, but he has more pressing things to deal with.

For now, the only thing he can focus on is ending the fucking clown.

Richie pulls away from the hug, touches the frame of glasses he hasn’t worn in almost thirty years. But here, those years are feeling less and less immediate, more like a dream.

The important part though, that much he can remember.

“Guys,” Richie says. “I know how to beat IT.”

He’s met with disbelieving stares, but when he explains, he can see the skepticism fading. Bev seconds the tactics. Swears that the clown seemed weakest when she wasn’t afraid. He can see the moment he convinces each one of them. Mike adjusting his grip on what looks like a piece of rebar. Bill straightening his back. Stan’s reluctant nod.

“What do we do now?” Eddie asks. He’s obviously still nervous, his eyes wide, but Richie knows how brave he is. He’s seen it in a hundred ways. In the future that’s starting to bleed into the nightmares the deadlights showed him. In this present every time he defied his mother’s orders and went out anyway.

It’s always made Richie want to be brave, too.

So he reaches out and grabs Eddie’s hand, threading their fingers together. Eddie looks startled by the motion, but not disgusted. Richie can see the exact moment he realizes this is not a joke and a hesitant smile blooms over his face.

“Now?” Richie gives Eddie’s hand a squeeze. “Now, we kill this fucking clown.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To all of the people who made it this far in this bizarre little fusion, thank you. I’m sorry it was significantly less funny than Jumanji, but I’ve had a ball. I hope you did, too.
> 
> And… to the four or five people who’ve been reading and commenting from the start, <333\. I love you best. :)
> 
> If you want to say hi: tumblr @ last01standing  
> Blog (mostly original writing): pkgwrites.wordpress.com


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